A Short History of Enclosure in Britain

By Simon Fairlie

Over the course of a few hundred years, much of Britain's land has been privatized — that is to say taken out of some form of collective ownership and management and handed over to individuals. Currently, in our "property-owning democracy", nearly half the country is owned by 40,000 land millionaires, or 0.06 per cent of the population,1 while most of the rest of us spend half our working lives paying off the debt on a patch of land barely large enough to accommodate a dwelling and a washing line.

There are many factors that have led to such extreme levels of land concentration, but the most blatant and the most contentious has been enclosure — the subdivision and fencing of common land into individual plots which were allocated to those people deemed to have held rights to the land enclosed. For over 500 years, pamphleteers, politicians and historians have argued about enclosure, those in favour (including the beneficiaries) insisting that it was necessary for economic development or "improvement", and those against (including the dispossessed) claiming that it deprived the poor of their livelihoods and led to rural depopulation. Reams of evidence derived from manorial rolls, tax returns, field orders and so on have been painstakingly unearthed to support either side. Anyone concocting a resumé of enclosure such as the one I present here cannot ignore E P Thompson's warning: "A novice in agricultural history caught loitering in those areas with intent would quickly be despatched."2

But over the last three decades, the enclosure debate has been swept up in a broader discourse on the nature of common property of any kind. The overgrazing of English common land has been held up as the archetypal example of the "tragedy of the commons" — the fatal deficiency that a neoliberal intelligentsia holds to be inherent in all forms of common property. Attitudes towards enclosures in the past were always ideologically charged, but now any stance taken towards them betrays a parallel approach to the crucial issues of our time: the management of global commons and the conflict between the global and the local, between development and diversity.

Those of us who have not spent a lifetime studying agricultural history should beware of leaping to convenient conclusions about the past, for nothing is quite what it seems. But no one who wishes to engage with the environmental politics of today can afford to plead agnostic on the dominant social conflict of our recent past. The account of enclosure that follows is offered with this in mind, and so I plead guilty to "loitering with intent".

The Tragedy of the Commons

In December 1968 Science magazine published a paper by Garrett Hardin entitled "The Tragedy of the Commons".3 How it came to be published in a serious academic journal is a mystery, since its central thesis, in the author's own words, is what "some would say is a platitude", while most of the paper consists of the sort of socio-babble that today can be found on the average blog. The conclusion, that "the alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate," is about as far removed from a sober scientific judgment as one could imagine.

Yet "The Tragedy of the Commons" became one of the most cited academic papers ever published and its title a catch phrase. It has framed the debate about common property for the last 30 years, and has exerted a baleful influence upon international development and environmental policy, even after Hardin himself admitted that he had got it wrong, and rephrased his entire theory.

But Hardin did get one thing right, and that is the reason for the lasting influence of his paper. He recognized that the common ownership of land, and the history of its enclosure, provides a template for understanding the enclosure of other common resources, ranging from the atmosphere and the oceans to pollution sinks and intellectual property. The physical fences and hedges that staked out the private ownership of the fields of England, are shadowed by the metaphorical fences that now delineate more sophisticated forms of private property. That Hardin misinterpreted the reasons and motives for fencing off private property is regrettable, and the overview of land enclosure in Britain that follows is just one of many attempts to put the record straight. But Hardin must nonetheless be credited for steering the environmental debate towards the crucial question of who owns the global resources that are, undeniably, "a common treasury for all".

Hardin's basic argument (or "platitude") was that common property systems allow individuals to benefit at a cost to the community, and therefore are inherently prone to decay, ecological exhaustion and collapse. Hardin got the idea for his theory from the Oxford economist, the Rev William Forster Lloyd who in 1833 wrote:

"Why are the cattle on a common so puny and stunted? Why is the common itself so bareworn and cropped so differently from the adjoining enclosures? If a person puts more cattle into his own field, the amount of the subsistence which they consume is all deducted from that which was at the command of his original stock; and if, before, there was no more than a sufficiency of pasture, he reaps no benefit from the additional cattle, what is gained one way, being lost in another. But if he puts more cattle on a common, the food which they consume forms a deduction which is shared between all the cattle, as well that of others as his own, and only a small part of it is taken from his own cattle."5

This is a neat description, and anybody who has lived in a communal situation will recognize that, as an analogy of human behaviour, there is more than a grain of truth in it: individuals often seek to profit from communal largesse if they can get away with it. Or as John Hales put it in 1581, "that which is possessed of manie in common is neglected by all." Hardin, however, takes Lloyd's observation and transforms it by injecting the added ingredient of "tragic" inevitability:

"The rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another . . . But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit — in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all."

Having established that "the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy", Hardin then proceeds to apply this tragedy to every kind of common property that he can think of. From fish populations to national parks and polluted streams to parking lots, wherever resources are held in common, there lies the path to over-exploitation and ruin, from which, he suggests, there is one preferred route of escape: "the Tragedy of the Commons, as a food basket, is averted by private property, or something formally like it."

Hardin continues:

"An alternative to the commons need not be perfectly just to be preferable. With real estate and other material goods, the alternative we have chosen is the institution of private property coupled with legal inheritance. Is this system perfectly just? . . . We must admit that our legal system of private property plus inheritance is unjust — but we put up with it because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin."

To be fair to Hardin, most of the above was incidental to his main point which was the need for population control. But it was music to the ears of free market economists who were convinced that private property rights were the solution to every social ill. A scientific, peer-reviewed, mathematical formula proving that common property led inexorably to ruin, and postulating that privatization, even unjust privatization, was the solution — and all encapsulated under the neat title of Tragedy of the Commons — what could be better? From the 1970s to the 1990s Hardin's Tragedy was picked up by right wing theorists and neo-colonial development agencies, to justify unjust and sometimes ruinous privatization schemes. In particular, it provided agencies such as the World Bank and marine economists with the rationale for the enclosure and privatization of fisheries through the creation, sale and trade of quotas.6

But as well as being one of the most cited papers, it was also one of the most heavily criticized, particularly by anthropologists and historians who cited innumerable instances where limited common resources were managed satisfactorily. What Hardin's theory overlooks, said E P Thompson "is that commoners were not without commonsense."7 The anthropologist Arthur McEvoy made the same point, arguing that the Tragedy "misrepresents the way common lands were used in the archetypal case" (ie England before enclosure):

"English farmers met twice a year at manor court to plan production for the coming months. On those occasions they certainly would have exchanged information about the state of their lands and sanctioned those who took more than their fair share from the common pool . . . The shortcoming of the tragic myth of the commons is its strangely unidimensional picture of human nature. The farmers on Hardin's pasture do not seem to talk to one another. As individuals, they are alienated, rational, utility-maximizing automatons and little else. The sum total of their social life is the grim, Hobbesian struggle of each against all, and all together against the pasture in which they are trapped."8

Faced with a barrage of similar evidence about both historical and existing commons, Hardin in the early 1990s, retracted his original thesis, conceding:

"The title of my 1968 paper should have been 'The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons' . . . Clearly the background of the resources discussed by Lloyd (and later by myself) was one of non-management of the commons under conditions of scarcity."9

In fact, this background wasn't clear at all, since it makes a nonsense of the idea of an inexorable tragedy. If degradation results from non-management and collapse can be averted by sound management, then there can be no "remorseless logic" leading to inevitable "ruin". Nor is there any reason why a private property regime (particularly an unjust one) should necessarily be preferable to the alternative of maintaining sound management of a commonly owned resource.

But even within the confined parameters of Hardin's "Hobbesian struggle of each against all", one wonders whether he has got it right. Is it really economically rational for a farmer to go on placing more and more stock on the pasture? If he does so, he will indeed obtain a higher return relative to his colleagues, but he will get a lower return relative to his capital investment in livestock; beyond a certain level of degradation he would be wiser to invest his money elsewhere. Besides — and this is a critical matter in pre-industrial farming systems — only a small number of wealthy farmers are likely to be able to keep sufficient stock through the winter to pursue this option. The most "rational" approach for powerful and unscrupulous actors is not to accrue vast herds of increasingly decrepit animals; it is to persuade everybody else that common ownership is inefficient (or even leads remorselessly to ruin) and therefore should be replaced with a private property system, of which they will be the beneficiaries. And of course the more stock they pile onto the commons, the more it appears that the system isn't working.10

The following account provides a generalized overview of the forces that led to inequitable reallocation of once communal resources. The over-exploitation of poorly regulated commons, as described by William Lloyd, certainly played a role at times, but there is no evidence, from Hardin or anyone else, that degradation of the land was inevitable or inexorable. At least as prominent in the story is the prolonged assault upon the commons by those who wanted to establish ownership for their own private gain — together with the ideological support from the likes of Lloyd and Hardin that has been used to clothe what otherwise often looks like naked acquisitiveness.

The Open Field System

Private ownership of land, and in particular absolute private ownership, is a modern idea, only a few hundred years old. "The idea that one man could possess all rights to one stretch of land to the exclusion of everybody else" was outside the comprehension of most tribespeople, or indeed of medieval peasants. The king, or the Lord of the Manor, might have owned an estate in one sense of the word, but the peasant enjoyed all sorts of so-called "usufructory" rights which enabled him, or her, to graze stock, cut wood or peat, draw water or grow crops, on various plots of land at specified times of year.

The open field system of farming, which dominated the flatter more arable central counties of England throughout the later medieval and into the modern period, is a classic common property system which can be seen in many parts of the world. The structure of the open fields system in Britain was influenced by the introduction of the caruca a large wheeled plough, developed by the Gauls, which was much more capable of dealing with heavy English clay soils than the lightweight Romanaratrum (Fraraire ). The caruca required a larger team of oxen to pull it —as many as eight on heavy soils — and was awkward to turn around, so very long strips were ideal. Most peasants could not afford a whole team of oxen, just one or two, so maintaining an ox team had to be a joint enterprise. Peasants would work strips of land, possibly proportionate to their investment in the ox team. The lands were farmed in either a two or three course rotation, with one year being fallow, so each peasant needed an equal number of strips in each section to maintain a constant crop year on year.

Furthermore, because the fields were grazed by the village herds when fallow, or after harvest, there was no possibility for the individual to change his style of farming: he had to do what the others were doing, when they did it, otherwise his crops would get grazed by everyone's animals. The livestock were also fed on hay from communal meadows (the distribution of hay was sometimes decided by an annual lottery for different portions of the field) and on communal pastures.

The open field system was fairly equitable, and from their analysis of the only remaining example of open field farming, at Laxton, Notts, the Orwins demonstrate that it was one where a lad with no capital or land to his name could gradually build up a larger holding in the communal land:
"A man may have no more than an acre or two, but he gets the full extent of them laid out in long "lands" for ploughing, with no hedgerows to reduce the effective area, and to occupy him in unprofitable labour. No sort of inclosure of the same size can be conceived which would give him equivalent facilities. Moreover he has his common rights which entitle him to graze his stock all over the 'lands' and these have a value, the equivalent of which in pasture fields would cost far more than he could afford to pay."11

In short, the common field system, rather ingeniously, made economies of scale, including use of a whopping great plough team, potentially accessible to small scale farmers. The downside was a sacrifice of freedom (or "choice" as it is now styled), but that is in the nature of economies of scale when they are equitably distributed — and when they are inequitably distributed some people have no choice at all. The open field system probably offered more independence to the peasant than a New World latifundia, or a fully collectivized communist farm. One irony of these economies of scale is that when large-scale machinery arrived, farmers who had enclosed open fields had to start ripping out their hedges again.

It is hard to see how Harding's Tragedy of the Commons has any bearing upon the rise and fall of this open field system. Far from collapsing as a result of increased population, the development of open field systems often occurred quite late in the Middle Ages, and may even have been a response to increasing population pressure, according to a paper by Joan Thirsk.12 When there was plenty of uncultivated land left to clear, people were able to stake out private plots of land without impinging too much upon others; when there was less land to go round, or when a single holding was divided amongst two or three heirs, there was pressure to divide arable land into strips and manage it semi-collectively.

The open fields were not restricted to any one kind of social structure or land tenure system. In England they evolved under Saxon rule and continued through the era of Norman serfdom. After the Black Death serfdom gave way to customary land tenure known as copyhold and as the moneyeconomy advanced this in turn gave way to leasehold. But none of these changes appeared to diminish the effectiveness of the open field system. On the other hand, in Celtic areas, and in other peripheral regions that were hilly or wooded, open fields were much less widespread, and enclosure of private fields occurred earlier (and probably more equitably) than it did in the central arable counties.

However, open fields were by no means restricted to England. Being a natural and reasonably equitable expression of a certain level of technology, the system was and still is found in many regions around the world. According to one French historian, "it must be emphasised that in France, open fields were the agricultural system of the most modernised regions, those which Quesnay cites as regions of 'high farming'."13 There are reports of similar systems of open field farming all over the world, for example in Anatolia, Turkey in the 1950s; and in Tigray, Ethiopia where the system is still widespread. In one area, in Tigray, Irob, "to avoid profiteering by ox owners of oxenless landowners, ox owners are obliged to first prepare the oxenless landowners' land and then his own. The oxenless landowners in return assist by supplying feed for the animals they use to plough the land."14

SHEEP DEVOUR PEOPLE

However, as medieval England progressed to modernity, the open field system and the communal pastures came under attack from wealthy landowners who wanted to privatize their use. The first onslaught, during the 14th to 17th centuries, came from landowners who converted arable land over to sheep, with legal support from the Statute of Merton of 1235. Villages were depopulated and several hundred seem to have disappeared. The peasantry responded with a series of ill fated revolts. In the 1381 Peasants' Revolt, enclosure was an issue, albeit not the main one. In Jack Cade's rebellion of 1450 land rights were a prominent demand.15 By the time of Kett's rebellion of 1549 enclosure was a main issue, as it was in the Captain Pouch revolts of 1604-1607 when the terms "leveller" and "digger" appeared, referring to those who levelled the ditches and fences erected by enclosers.16

The first recorded written complaint against enclosure was made by a Warwickshire priest, John Rous, in his History of the Kings of England, published around 1459-86.17 The first complaint by a celebrity (and 500 years later it remains the most celebrated denounciation of enclosure) was by Thomas More in Utopia:

"Your shepe that were wont to be so meke and tame, and so smal eaters, now, as I heare saye, be become so great devowerers and so wylde, that they eate up and swallow down the very men them selfes. They consume, destroye, and devoure whole fields, howses and cities . . . Noble man andgentleman, yea and certeyn Abbottes leave no ground for tillage, thei inclose all into pastures; they throw down houses; they pluck down townes, and leave nothing standynge but only the churche to be made a shepehowse."18

Other big names of the time weighed in with similar views: Thomas Wolsey, Hugh Latimer, William Tyndale, Lord Somerset and Francis Bacon all agreed, and even though all of these were later executed, as were Cade, Kett and Pouch (they did Celebrity Big Brother properly in those days), the Tudor and Stuart monarchs took note and introduced a number of laws and commissions which managed to keep a check on the process of enclosure. One historian concludes from the number of anti-enclosure commissions set up by Charles I that he was "the one English monarch of outstanding importance as an agrarian reformer."19 But (as we shall see) Charles was not averse to carrying out enclosures of his own.

THE DIGGERS

A somewhat different approach emerged during the English Revolution when Gerrard Winstanley and fellow diggers, in 1649, started cultivating land on St George's Hill, Surrey, and proclaimed a free Commonwealth. "The earth (which was made to be a Common Treasury of relief for all, both Beasts and Men)" state the Diggers in their first manifesto "was hedged into Inclosures by the teachers and rulers, and the others were made Servants and Slaves." The same pamphlet warned: "Take note that England is not a Free people, till the Poor that have no Land, have a free allowance to dig and labour the Commons, and so live as Comfortably as the Landlords that live in their Inclosures."20

The Diggers appear to be not so much a resistance movement of peasants in the course of being squeezed off the land, as an inspired attempt to reclaim the land by people whose historical ties may well have already been dissolved, some generations previously. Like many radicals Winstanley was a tradesman in the textile industry. William Everard, his most prominent colleague, was a cashiered army officer. It is tempting to see the Diggers as the original "back to the land" movement, a bunch of idealistic drop-outs.21 Winstanley wrote so many pamphlets in such a short time that one wonders whether he had time to wield anything heavier than a pen. Nevertheless during 1649 he was earning his money as a hired cowherd; and no doubt at least some of the diggers were from peasant backgrounds.

More to the point, the Diggers weren't trying to stop "inclosures"; they didn't go round tearing down fences and levelling ditches, like both earlier and later rebels. In a letter to the head of the army, Fairfax, Winstanley stated that if some wished to "call the Inclosures [their] own land . . . we are not against it," though this may have been just a diplomatic gesture. Instead they wanted to create their own alternative Inclosure which would be a "Common Treasury of All" and where commoners would have "the freedom of the land for their livelihood . . . as the Gentry hathe the benefit of their Inclosures". Winstanley sometimes speaks the same language of "improvement" as the enclosers, but wishes to see its benefits extended to the poor rather than reserved for wealthy: "If the wasteland of England were manured by her children it would become in a few years the richest, the strongest and the most flourishing land in the world".22 In some ways the Diggers foreshadow the smallholdings and allotments movements of the late 19th and 20th century and the partageux of the French revolution — poor peasants who favoured the enclosure of commons if it resulted in their distribution amongst the landless.

It is slightly surprising that the matter of 50 or so idealists planting carrots on a bit of wasteland and proclaiming that the earth was a "Common Treasury" should have attracted so much attention, both from the authorities at the time, and from subsequent historians and campaigners. 200 years before, at the head of his following of Kentish peasants (described by Shakespeare as "the filth and scum of Kent") Jack Cade persuaded the first army dispatched by the king to pack up and go home, skilfully evaded a second army of 15,000 men led by Henry VI himself, and then defeated a third army, killing two of the king's generals, before being finally apprehended and beheaded. Although pictured by the sycophantic author of Henry VI Part II as a brutal and blustering fool with pretensions above his station, Cade was reported by contemporaries to be "a young man of goodlie stature and right pregnant of wit".23 He is potentially good material for a romantic Hollywood blockbuster starring Johnny Depp, whereas Winstanley (who has had a film made about him), after the Digger episode, apparently settled into middle age as a Quaker, a church warden and finally a chief constable.24

THE BLACKS

Winstanley and associates were lucky not to die on the scaffold. The habit of executing celebrities was suspended during the Interregnum — after the beheading of Charles I, anyone else would have been an anticlimax. Executions were resumed (but mainly for plebs, not celebs) initially by Judge Jeffries in his Bloody Assizes in 1686 and subsequently some 70 years later with the introduction of the Black Acts.

The Black Acts were the vicious response of prime minister Walpole and his cronies to increasing resistance to the enclosure of woodlands. The rights of commoners to take firewood, timber and game from woodlands, and to graze pigs in them, had been progressively eroded for centuries: free use of forests and abolition of game laws was one of the demands that Richard II agreed to with his fingers crossed when he confronted Wat Tyler during the 1381 Peasants Revolt.25 But in the early 18th century the process accelerated as wealthy landowners enclosed forests for parks and hunting lodges, dammed rivers for fishponds, and allowed their deer to trash local farmer's crops.

Commoners responded by organizing vigilante bands which committed ever more brazen acts of resistance. One masked gang, whose leader styled himself King John, on one morning in 1721, killed 11 deer out of the Bishop's Park at Farnham and rode through Farnham market with them at 7 am in triumph. On another occasion when a certain Mr Wingfield started charging poor people for offcuts of felled timber which they had customarily had for free, King John and his merry men ring-barked a plantation belonging to Wingfield, leaving a note saying that if he didn't return the money to the peasants, more trees would be destroyed. Wingfield paid up. King John could come and go as he pleased because he had local support — on one occasion, to refute a charge of Jacobinism, he called the 18th century equivalent of a press-conference near an inn on Waltham Chase. He turned up with 15 of his followers, and with 300 of the public assembled, the authorities made no attempt to apprehend him. He was never caught, and for all we know also eventually became a chief constable.26

Gangs such as these, who sooted their faces, both as a disguise and so as not to be spotted at night, were known as "the blacks", and so the legislation introduced two years later in 1723 was known as the Black Act. Without doubt the most viciously repressive legislation enacted in Britain in the last 400 years, this act authorized the death penalty for more than 50 offences connected with poaching. The act stayed on the statute books for nearly a century, hundreds were hanged for the crime of feeding themselves with wild meat, and when the act was finally repealed, poachers were, instead, transported to the Antipodes for even minor offences.

This episode in English history lives on in folk songs, such as Geordie and Van Dieman's Land. The origins of the Black Act, and in particular the exceptional unpleasantness of prime minister Walpole, are superbly recounted in E P Thompson's Whigs and Hunters. Resistance to forest enclosure was by no means confined to England. In France there was mass resistance to the state's take-over of numerous communal forests: in the Ariège, the Guerre des Demoiselles involved attacks by 20 or 30, and on occasion even up to 800 peasants, disguised as women.23 In Austria, the "war of the mountains" between poachers and the gamekeepers of the Empire continued for centuries, the last poacher to be shot dead being Pius Walder in 1982.24

DRAINING THE FENS

Another area which harboured remnants of a hunter gatherer economy was the fenland of Holland in south Lincolnshire, and the Isle of Axholme in the north of the county. Although the main earner was the summer grazing of rich common pastures with dairy cattle, horses and geese, in winter, when large tracts of the commons were inundated, fishing and fowling became an important source of income, and for those with no land to keep beasts on over winter it was probably a main source of income. During the Middle Ages, Holland was well off — its tax assessment per acre was the third highest in the kingdom in 1334 — and this wealth was relatively equitably distributed with "a higher proportion of small farmers and a lower proportion of very wealthy ones".29

In the early 1600s, the Stuart kings James I and Charles I, hard up for cash, embarked on a policy of draining the fenland commons to provide valuable arable land that would yield the crown a higher revenue. Dutch engineers, notably Cornelius Vermuyden, were employed to undertake comprehensive drainage schemes which cost the crown not a penny, because the developers were paid by being allocated a third of the land enclosed and drained.

The commoners' resistance to the drainage schemes was vigorous. A 1646 pamphlet with the title The Anti-Projector must be one of the earliesr grass roots denunciations of a capitalist development project, and makes exactly the same points that indigenous tribes today make when fighting corporate land grabs:

"The Undertakers have alwaies vilified the fens, and have misinformed many Parliament men, that all the fens is a meer quagmire, and that it is a level hurtfully surrounded and of little or no value: but those who live in the fens and are neighbours to it, know the contrary."

The anonymous author goes on to list the benefits of the fens including: the "serviceable horses", the "great dayeries which afford great store of butter and cheese", the flocks of sheep, the "osier, reed and sedge", and the "many thousand cottagers which live on our fens which must otherwise go a begging." And he continues by comparing these to the biofuels that the developers proposed to plant on the newly drained land:

"What is coleseed and rape, they are but Dutch commodities, and but trash and trumpery and pills land, in respect of the fore-recited commodities which are the rich oare of the Commonwealth."30

The commoners fought back by rioting, by levelling the dikes, and by taking the engineers to court. Their lawsuits were paid for "out of a common purse to which each villager contributed according to the size of the holding", though Charles I attempted to prevent them levying money for this purpose, and to prosecute the ringleaders. However, Charles' days were numbered, and when civil war broke out in the 1640s, the engineering project was shelved, and the commoners reclaimed all the fen from the developers. In 1642 Sir Anthony Thomas was driven out of East and West Fens and the Earl of Lyndsey was ejected from Lyndsey Level. In 1645 all the drainers' banks in Axholme were destroyed. And between 1642 and 1649 the Crown's share of fenland in numerous parishes was seized by the inhabitants, and returned to common.

Just over a century later, from 1760, the drainers struck again, and this time they were more successful. There was still resistance in the form of pamphlets, riots, rick-burning etc. But the high price of corn worked in favour of those who wanted to turn land over to arable. And there was less solidarity amongst commoners, because, according to Joan Thirsk, wealthy commoners who could afford to keep more animals over winter (presumably because of agricultural improvements) were overstocking the commons:

"The seemingly equitable system of sharing the commons among all commoners was proving far from equitable in practice . . . Mounting discontent with the existing unfair distribution of common rights weakened the opponents of drainage and strengthened its supporters."

Between 1760 and 1840 most of the fens were drained and enclosed by act of parliament. The project was not an instant success. As the land dried out it shrunk and lowered against the water table, and so became more vulnerable to flooding. Pumping stations had to be introduced, powered initially and unsuccessfully by windmills, then by steam engines, and now the entire area is kept dry thanks to diesel. Since drainage eventually created one of the most productive areas of arable farmland in Britain, it would be hard to argue that it was not an economic improvement; but the social and environmental consequences have been less happy. Much of the newly cultivated land lay at some distance from the villages and was taken over by large landowners; it was not unusual to find a 300 acre holding without a single labourers' cottage on it. Farmers therefore developed the gang-labour system of employment that exists to this day:

"The long walk to and from work . . . the rough conditions of labour out of doors in all weathers, the absence of shelter for eating, the absence of privacy for performing natural functions and the neglect of childrens' schooling, combined to bring up an unhappy, uncouth and demoralized generation."

The 1867 Gangs Act was introduced to prohibit the worst abuses; yet in 2004, when the Gangmasters Licensing Act was passed (in the wake of the Morecambe Bay cockle pickers tragedy), the government was still legislating against the evils of this system of employment. But even if large landowners were the main beneficiaries, many of the fenland smallholders managed to exact some compensation for the loss of their commons, and what they salvaged was productive land. The smallholder economy that characterized the area in medieval times survived, so that in 1870, and again in 1937, more than half of the agricultural holdings were less than 20 acres. In the 1930s the "quaint distribution of land among a multitude of small owners, contrary to expectations, had helped to mitigate the effects of the depression."

SCOTTISH CLEARANCES

By the end of the 18th century the incentive to convert tilled land in England over to pasture was dying away. There were a number of reasons for this. Firstly, the population was beginning to rise rapidly as people were displaced from the land and ushered into factory work in towns, and so more land was required for producing food. Secondly, cotton imported from the US and India, was beginning to replace English wool. And thirdly, Scotland had been united with England and its extensive pastures lay ready to be "devowered by shepe".

The fact that these lands were populated by Highland clansmen presented no obstacle. In a process that has become known as the Clearances, thousands of Highlanders were evicted from their holdings and shipped off to Canada, or carted off to Glasgow to make way for Cheviot sheep. Others were concentrated on the West coast to work picking kelp seaweed, then necessary for the soap and glass industry, and were later to form the nucleus of the crofting community. Some cottagers were literally burnt out of house and home by the agents of the Lairds. This is from the account of Betsy Mackay, who was sixteen when she was evicted from the Duke of Sutherland's estates:

"Our family was very reluctant to leave and stayed for some time, but the burning party came round and set fire to our house at both ends, reducing to ashes whatever remained within the walls. The people had to escape for their lives, some of them losing all their clothes except what they had on their back. The people were told they could go where they liked, provided they did not encumber the land that was by rights their own. The people were driven away like dogs."31

The clearances were so thorough that few people were even left to remember, and the entire process was suppressed from collective memory, until its history was retold, first by John Prebble in The Highland Clearances, and subsequently by James Hunter in The Making of the Crofting Community. When Prebble's book appeared, the Historiographer Royal for Scotland Professor Gordon Donaldson commented:

"I am sixty-eight now and until recently had hardly heard of the Highland Clearances. The thing has been blown out of proportion."32

But how else can one explain the underpopulation of the Highlands? The region's fate was poignantly described by Canadian Hugh Maclennan in an essay called "Scotchman's Return":

"The Highland emptiness only a few hundred miles above the massed population of England is a far different thing from the emptiness of our North West territories. Above the 60th parallel in Canada, you feel that nobody but God had ever been there before you. But in a deserted Highland glen, you feel that everyone who ever mattered is dead and gone."33

PARLIAMENTARY ENCLOSURES

The final and most contentious wave of land enclosures in England occurred between about 1750 and 1850. Whereas the purpose of most previous enclosures had been to turn productive arable land into less productive (though more privately lucrative) sheep pasture, the colonization of Scotland for wool, and India and the Southern US states for cotton now prompted the advocates of enclosure to play a different set of cards: their aim was to turn open fields, pastures and wastelands — everything in fact — into more productive arable and mixed farm land. Their byword was "improvement". Their express aim was to increase efficiency and production and so both create and feed an increasingly large proletariat who would work either as wage labourers in the improved fields, or as machine minders in the factories.

There is, unfortunately, no book that takes for its sole focus of study the huge number of pamphlets, reports and diatribes — often with stirring titles like Inclosure thrown Open or Crying Sin of England in not Caring for the Poor — which were published by both supporters and critics of enclosure in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries.34

The main arguments of those in favour of enclosure were:

(i) that the open field system prevented "improvement", for example the introduction of clover, turnips and four course rotations, because individuals could not innovate;
(ii) that the waste lands and common pastures were "bare-worn" or full of scrub, and overstocked with half-starved beasts;
(iii) that those who survived on the commons were (a) lazy and (b) impoverished (in other words "not inclined to work for wages"), and that enclosure of the commons would force them into employment.

The main arguments of those against enclosure were:

(i) that the common pastures and waste lands were the mainstay of the independent poor; when they were overgrazed, that was often as a result of overstocking by the wealthiest commoners who were the people agitating for enclosure
(ii) that enclosure would engross already wealthy landowners, force poor people off the land and into urban slums, and result in depopulation.

The question of agricultural improvement has been exhaustively assessed with the benefit of hindsight, and this account will come back to it later. At the time the propaganda in favour of enclosure benefited considerably from state support. The loudest voice in support of improvement, former farmer Arthur Young (a classic example of the adage that those who can, do — those who can't become consultants) was made the first Secretary of Prime Minister William Pitt's new Board of Agriculture, which set about publishing, in 1793, a series of General Views on the Agriculture of all the shires of England. The Board "was not a Government department, like its modern namesake, but an association of gentlemen, chiefly landowners, for the advancement of agriculture, who received a grant from the government." Tate observes: "The ninety odd volumes are almost monotonous in their reiteration of the point that agricultural improvement has come through enclosure and that more enclosure must take place."35

Whilst the view that enclosure hastened improvement may well have been broadly correct, it is nonetheless fair to call these reports state propaganda. When Arthur Young changed his opinion, in 1801, and presented a report to the Board's Committee showing that enclosure had actually caused severe poverty in numerous villages, the committee (after sitting on the report for a month) "told me I might do what I pleased with it for myself, but not print it as a work for the Board. . . probably it will be printed without effect."36 Young was not the only advocate of enclosure to change his mind: John Howlett was another prominent advocate of enclosure who crossed the floor after seeing the misery it caused.

Between 1760 and 1870, about 7 million acres (about one sixth the area of England) were changed, by some 4,000 acts of parliament, from common land to enclosed land.37 However necessary this process might or might not have been for the improvement of the agricultural economy, it was downright theft. Millions of people had customary and legal access to lands and the basis of an independent livelihood was snatched away from them through what to them must have resembled a Kafkaesque tribunal carried out by members of the Hellfire Club. If you think this must be a colourful exaggeration, then read J L and Barbara Hammonds' accounts of Viscount "Bully" Bolingbroke's attempt to enclose Kings' Sedgmoor to pay off his gambling debts: "Bully," wrote the chairman of the committee assessing the proposal, "has a scheme of enclosure which if it succeeds, I am told will free him of all his difficulties"; or of the Spencer/Churchill's proposal, in the face of repeated popular opposition, to enclose the common at Abingdon (see box p 26).38 And if you suspect that the Hammond's accounts may be extreme examples (right wing historians are rather sniffy about the Hammonds)39 then look at the map provided by Tate showing the constituency of MPs who turned up to debate enclosure bills for Oxfordshire when they came up in parliament. There was no requirement, in the parliament of the day, to declare a "conflict of interest".

Out of 796 instances of MPs turning up for any of the Oxfordshire bills, 514 were Oxfordshire MPs, most of whom would have been landowners.40

To make a modern analogy, it was as if Berkeley Homes, had put in an application to build housing all over your local country park, and when you went along to the planning meeting to object, the committee consisted entirely of directors of Berkeley, Barretts and Bovis — and there was no right of appeal. However, in contrast to the modern rambler, the commoners lost not only their open space and their natural environment (the poems of John Clare remind us how significant that loss was); they also lost one of their principal means of making a living. The "democracy" of late 18th and early 19th century English parliament, at least on this issue, proved itself to be less answerable to the needs of the common man than the dictatorships of the Tudors and Stuarts. Kings are a bit more detached from local issues than landowners, and, with this in mind, it may not seem so surprising that popular resistance should often appeal to the King for justice. (A similar recourse can be seen in recent protests by Chinese peasants, who appeal to the upper echelons of the Communist Party for protection against the expropriation of collective land by corrupt local officials).

ALLOTMENTS AND SMALLHOLDINGS

Arthur Young's 1801 report was called An Inquiry into the Propriety of Applying Wastes to the Maintenance and Support of the Poor. Young, Howlett, David Davies, and indeed most of those who were concerned for the future welfare of the dispossessed (whether or not they approved of enclosure), argued that those who lost commons rights should be compensated with small enclosures of their own.

The losers in the process of enclosure were of two kinds. First there were the landless, or nearly so, who had no ownership rights over the commons, but who gained a living from commons that were open access, or where a measure of informal use was tolerated. These people had few rights, appeared on no records, and received nothing in compensation for the livelihood they lost. But there was also a class of smallholders who did have legal rights, and hence were entitled to compensation. However, the amount of land they were allocated "was often so small, though in strict legal proportion to the amount of their claim, that it was of little use and speedily sold." Moreover, the considerable legal, surveying, hedging and fencing costs of enclosure were disproportionate for smaller holdings. And on top of that, under the "Speenhamland" system of poor relief, the taxes of the small landowner who worked his own land, went to subsidize the labour costs of the large farmers who employed the landless, adding to the pressure to sell up to aggrandizing landowners.41

Since it was generally acknowledged that a rural labourer's wages could not support his family, which therefore had to be supported by the poor rates, there were good arguments on all sides for providing the dispossessed with sufficient land to keep a cow and tend a garden. The land was available. It would have made very little impression upon the final settlement of most enclosure acts if areas of wasteland had been sectioned off and distributed as secure decent-sized allotments to those who had lost their common rights. In a number of cases where this happened (for example in the village of Dilhorn, or on Lord Winchelsea's estates), it was found that cottagers hardly ever needed to apply for poor relief. Moreover, it had been shown (by research conducted by the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor and the Labourer's Friends Society) that smallholdings cultivated by spade could be more productive than large farms cultivated by the plough.42

In the face of such a strong case for the provision of smallholdings, it took a political economist to come up with reasons for not providing them. Burke, Bentham and a host of lesser names, all of them fresh from reading Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, advised Pitt and subsequent prime ministers that there was no way in which the government could help the poor, or anybody else, except by increasing the nation's capital (or as we now say, its GDP). No kind of intervention on behalf of the landless poor should be allowed to disturb the "invisible hand" of economic self interest — even though the hand that had made them landless in the first place was by no means invisible, and was more like an iron fist. At the turn of the century, the Reverend Thomas Malthus waded in with his argument that helping the poor was a waste of time since it only served to increase the birth rate — a view which was lapped up by those Christians who had all along secretly believed that the rich should inherit the earth.

Ricardo's theory of rent was also pulled in to bolster the arguments against providing allotments. A common justification for enclosure and attraction for landowners had always been that rents rose — doubled very often — after enclosure. This was blithely attributed to improvement of the land, as though there could be no other cause. Few gave much thought to the possibility that an increase in rent would result from getting rid of encumbrances, such as commoners and their common rights (in much the same way, that nowadays, a property increases in value if sitting tenants can be persuaded to leave, or an agricultural tie is removed). Rent may show up on the GDP, but is an unreliable indicator of productivity, as contemporary writer Richard Bacon pointed out when he gave this explanation (paraphrased here by Brian Inglis) why landowners and economists were opposed to allotments:

"Suppose for argument's sake, 20 five-acre farms, cultivated by spade husbandry, together were more productive than a single 100-acre farm using machinery. This did not mean that the landowners would get more rent from them — far from it. As each 5 acre farm might support a farmer and his family, the surplus available for tenants to pay in rent would be small. The single tenant farmer, hiring labourers when he needed them, might have a lower yield, from his hundred acres, but he would have a larger net profit — and it was from net profit that rent was derived. That was why landlords preferred consolidation."43

Richard Bacon deserves applause for explaining very clearly why capitalism prefers big farms and forces people off the land. It is also worth noting that the increased rent after enclosure had to be subsidized by the poor rates — the taxes which landowners had to pay to support the poor who were forced into workhouses.

CORN LAWS, COTTON, AND COUNTY FARMS

In 1846, after a fierce debate, the tariffs on imported corn which helped maintain the price of British grown wheat were repealed. The widespread refusal to provide land for the dispossessed, and the emergence of an urban proletariat who didn't have the option of growing their own food, made it possible for proponents of the free market to paint their campaign for the repeal of the Corn Laws as a humanitarian gesture. Cheap bread from cheap imported corn was of interest to the economists and industrialists because it made wages cheaper; at the same time it was of benefit to the hungry landless poor (provided wages didn't decline correspondingly, which Malthus claimed was what would happen). The combined influence of all these forces was enough to get tariffs removed from imported corn and open up the UK market to the virgin lands of the New World.

The founders of the Anti Corn Law association were John Bright, a Manchester MP and son of a cotton mill owner, and Richard Cobden, MP for Stockport and subsequently Rochdale. Their main interest was in cheap corn in order to keep the price of factory labour down, (Bright was opposed to factory legislation and trade union rights); but their most powerful argument was that only a handful of landowners benefited from high prices. It was in a belated attempt to prove the contrary that in 1862 Lord Derby persuaded parliament to commission a land registry; but the publication in 1872 of the Return of Owners of Land, confirmed that Bright and Cobden were broadly right: 0.6 per cent of the population owned 98.5 per cent of the agricultural land.44

Had the labourers of Britain been rural smallholders, rather than city slumdwellers, then a high price for corn, and hence for agricultural products in general, might have been more in their interest, and it is less likely that the corn laws would have been repealed. If England had kept its peasantry (as most other European countries did) there would have been fewer landless labourers and abandoned children, wages for factory workers might have been higher, and the English cotton industry might not have been so well poised to undercut and then destroy thousands of local industries around the world which produced textiles of astonishing craftsmanship and beauty. By 1912 Britain, which couldn't even grow cotton, was exporting nearly seven billion yards of cotton cloth each year — enough to provide a suit of clothes for every man woman and child alive in the world at the time.45 Globalization was a dominant force by the end of the 19th century.

Ironically, it was the same breed of political economists who had previously advocated improvement that was now arguing for grain imports which would make these improvements utterly pointless. The repeal had a delayed effect because it was not until after the construction of the trans-continental American railways, in the 1870s, that cereals grown on low-rent land confiscated from native Americans could successfully undermine UK farming. By the 1880s the grain was also being imported in the form of thousands of tonnes of refrigerated beef which undercut home produced meat. There were even, until the late 1990s, cheaper transport rates within the UK for imported food than for home-grown food.46 The lucky farm workers who emigrated to the New World were writing back to their friends and family in words such as these:

"There is no difficulty of a man getting land here. Many will let a man have land with a few acres improvement and a house on it without any deposit."

"I am going to work on my own farm of 50 acres, which I bought at £55 and I have 5 years to pay it in. I have bought me a cow and 5 pigs. If I had stayed at Corsley I should ever have had nothing."47

Unable to compete with such low rents, England's agricultural economy went into a decline from which it never properly recovered. Conditions of life for the remaining landless agricultural workers deteriorated even further, while demand for factory workers in the cities was not expanding as it had done in the early 19th century. Of the 320,000 acres enclosed between 1845 and 1869, just 2,000 had been allocated for the benefit of labourers and cottagers.48

It was in this context that the call for smallholdings and allotments was revived. "Three Acres and A Cow" was the catch phrase coined by liberal MP Jesse Collings, whose programme is outlined in his book Land Reform. In 1913 the parliamentary Land Enquiry Committee issued its report The Land (no relation) which included copious first hand evidence of the demand for and the benefits of smallholdings. Both books focused on the enclosure of commons as the prime source of the problem.49 A series of parliamentary statutes, from the 1887 Allotments Act, the 1892 Smallholding Act, and the 1908 Smallholding and Allotments Act provided local authorities with the power to acquire the land which now still exists in the form of numerous municipal allotments and the County Smallholdings Estate.

The County Smallholdings, in particular, came under attack when a second wave of free market ideologues came into power in the 1980s and 1990s. The Conservative Party's 1995 Rural White Paper advocated selling off the County Farms, and since then about a third of the estate has been sold, though there are signs that the number of sales is declining.50

THE END OF ENCLOSURE

The enclosure movement was brought to an end when it started to upset the middle classes. By the 1860s, influential city-dwellers noticed that areas for recreation were getting thin on the ground. In the annual enclosure bills for 1869, out of 6,916 acres of land scheduled for enclosure, just three acres were allocated for recreation, and six acres for allotments.51 A protection society was formed, the Commons Preservation Society, headed by Lord Eversley, which later went on to become the Open Spaces Society, and also spawned the National Trust. The Society was not afraid to support direct action tactics, such as the levelling of fences, and used them successfully, in the case of Epping Forest and Berkhampstead Common, to initiate court cases which drew attention to their cause.52 Within a few years the Society had strong support in parliament, and the 1876 Commons Act ruled that enclosure should only take place if there was some public benefit.

In any case, in the agricultural depression that by 1875 was well established, improvement was no longer a priority, and in the last 25 years of the 19th century only a handful of parliamentary enclosures took place. Since then, the greatest loss of commons has probably been as a result of failure to register under the 1965 Commons Registration Act.

In some case commons went on being used as such wellafter they had been legally enclosed, because in the agricultural slump of the late 19th century, landowners could see no profit in improvement. George Bourne describes how in his Surrey village, although the common had been enclosed in 1861, the local landless were able to continue using it informally until the early years of the 20th century. What eventually kicked them out was not agricultural improvement, but suburban development — but that is another story. Bourne comments:

"To the enclosure of the common more than to any other cause may be traced all the changes that have subsequently passed over the village. It was like knocking the keystone out of an arch. The keystone is not the arch; but once it is gone all sorts of forces previously resisted, begin to operate towards ruin."53

THE VERDICT OF MODERN HISTORIANS

The standard interpretation of enclosure, at least 18th-19th century enclosure, is that it was "a necessary evil, and there would have been less harm in it if the increased dividend of the agricultural world had been fairly distributed."54 Nearly all assessments are some kind of variation on this theme, with weight placed either upon the need for "agricultural improvement" or upon the social harm according to the ideological disposition of the writer. There is no defender of the commons who argues that enclosure did not provide, or at least hasten, some improvements in agriculture (the Hammonds ignore the issue and focus on the injustices); and there is no supporter of enclosure who does not concede that the process could have been carried out more equitably.

Opinion has shifted significantly in one or two respects. The classic agricultural writers of the 1920s, such as Lord Ernle, considered that agricultural improvements — the so-called agricultural revolution — had been developed by large-scale progressive farmers in the late 1800s and that enclosure was an indispensable element in allowing these innovators to come to the fore.47 In the last 30 years a number of historians have shown that innovation was occurring throughout the preceding centuries, and that it was by no means impossible, or even unusual, for four course rotations, and new crops to be introduced into the open field system. In Hunmanby in Yorkshire a six year system with a two year ley was introduced. At Barrowby, Lincs, in 1697 the commoners agreed to pool their common pastures and their open fields, both of which had become tired, and manage them on a twelve year cycle of four years arable and eight years ley. 55

Of course it might well take longer for a state-of-the-art farmer to persuade a majority of members of a common field system to switch over to experimental techniques, than it would to strike out on his own. One can understand an individual's frustration, but from the community's point of view, why the hurry? Overhasty introduction of technical improvements often leads to social disruption. In any case, if we compare the very minimal agricultural extension services provided for the improvement of open field agriculture to the loud voices in favour of enclosure, it is hard not to conclude that "improvement" served partly as a Trojan horse for those whose main interest was consolidation and engrossment of land.

A main area of contention has been the extent to which enclosure was directly responsible for rural depopulation and the decline of small farmers. A number of commentators (eg Gonner, Chambers and Minguay) have argued that these processes were happening anyway and often cannot be directly linked to enclosure. More recently Neeson has shown that in Northants, the disappearance of smallholders was directly linked to enclosure, and she has suggested that the smaller kinds of commoner, particularly landless and part-time farmers, were being defined out of the equation.56

But these disputes, like many others thrown up by the fact that every commons was different, miss the bigger picture. The fact is that England and Wales' rural population dived from 65 per cent of the population in 1801 to 23 per cent in 1901; while in France 59 per cent of the population remained rural in 1901, and even in 1982, 31 per cent were country dwellers. Between 1851 and 1901 England and Wales' rural population declined by 1.4 million, while total population rose by 14.5 million and the urban population nearly tripled.57 By 1935, there was one worker for every 12 hectares in the UK, compared to one worker for every 4.5 hectares in France, and one for every 3.4 hectares across the whole of Europe.58

Britain set out, more or less deliberately, to become a highly urbanized economy with a large urban proletariat dispossessed from the countryside, highly concentrated landownership, and farms far larger than any other country in Europe. Enclosure of the commons, more advanced in the UK than anywhere else in Europe, was not the only means of achieving this goal: free trade and the importing of food and fibre from the New World and the colonies played a part, and so did the English preference for primogeniture (bequeathing all your land to your eldest son). But enclosure of common land played a key role in Britain's industrialization, and was consciously seen to do so by its protagonists at the time.

THE TRAGEDY

The above account of the enclosure of the English commons is given for its own sake; but also because the management of English common pasture is the starting point of Hardin's thesis, so it is against the tapestry of English commons rights and the tortuous process of their enclosure that Hardin's formulaic tragedy may initially be judged.

Hardin's theory springs from the observation that common pastures allowed individuals to benefit from overstocking at the community's expense, and therefore were inherently prone to ecological exhaustion and ultimately "ruin". Without doubt there were common pastures which matched the description given by William Lloyd, as amplified by Hardin. But the salient fact that emerges from the copious historical studies that have been compiled from local field orders, land tax returns, enclosure awards and so on, is that 18th century commons and common pastures were about as different, one from another, as farms are today. Many were managed according to very detailed rules set by the local manorial court regulating stocking levels (or "stints"), manuring, disease control and so forth; but these rules varied considerably from one village to another. In some places they were found to be more necessary, or were more scrupulously observed than they were in others.

There were indeed "unstinted" commons where there was little control upon the number of animals, though this did not invariably result in impoverishment (see box p26); and there were others where stints were not applied properly, or commoners took advantage of lax or corrupt management to place as many animals on the common as they could at the common expense. Where there was overstocking, according to Gonner, this was "largely to the advantage of rich commoners or the Lord of the manor, who got together large flocks and herds and pastured them in the common lands to the detriment of the poorer commoners . . . The rich crowded their beasts on, and literally eat out the poor." Time and again historians on both sides of the ideological divide come up with instances where overstocking was carried out by one or two wealthy farmers at the expense of the poorer commoners, who could not overstock, even if they wanted to, because they had not the means to keep large numbers of animals over winter.59 Even advocates of enclosure conceded that it was the wealthy farmers who were causing the problems, as when Fitzherbert observed:

"Every cottage shall have his porcyon [portion, ie plot of land] assigned to him according to his rent, and then shall not the riche man oppress the poore man with his catell, and every man shall eate his owne close at his pleasure."60

This comes as no great surprise, but the presence of powerful interest groups, possibly in a position to pervert the management regime, suggests a different scenario from that given by Hardin of "rational herdsmen" each seeking to maximise their individual gain. Hardin's construct is like the Chinese game of go where each counter has the same value; real life is more like chess, where a knight or a bishop can outclass a pawn.

Perhaps there were instances where a profusion of unregulated, "rational" yet unco-operative paupers overburdened the commons with an ever-increasing population of half-starved animals, in line with Lloyd's scenario. But even when there are reports from observers to this effect we have to be careful, for one man's puny and stunted beast is another man's hardy breed. Stunting is another way of stinting. Lloyd was writing at a time when stockbreeders were obsessed with producing prize specimens that to our modern eye appear grotesquely obese. In 1800, the celebrated Durham Ox, weighing nearly 3000 pounds, made a triumphal tour of Britain, and two years later about 2,000 people paid half a guinea for an engraving of the same beast.61 To these connoisseurs of fatstock, the commoners' house cow must have appeared as skeletal as do the zebu cattle of India and Africa in comparison to our Belgian Blues and cloned Holsteins. Yet the zebus provide a livelihood for hundreds of millions of third world farmers, are well adapted to producing milk, offspring, dung and traction from sparse and erratic dryland pastures and poor quality crop residues, and in terms of energy and protein are more efficient at doing so.

Much the same may have been true of the commoners' cows. According to J M Neeson a poor cow providing a gallon of milk per day in season brought in half the equivalent of a labourer's annual wage. Geese at Otmoor could bring in the equivalent of a full time wage (see box p26). Commoners sheep were smaller, but hardier, easier to lamb and with higher quality wool, just like present day Shetlands, which are described by their breed society as "primitive and unimproved". An acre of gorse — derided as worthless scrub by advocates of improved pasture — was worth 45s 6d as fuel for bakers or lime kilns at a time when labourers' wages were a shilling a day.62 On top of that, the scrub or marsh yielded innumerable other goods, including reed for thatch, rushes for light, firewood, peat, sand, plastering material, herbs, medicines, nuts, berries, an adventure playground for kids and more besides. No wonder the commoners were "idle" and unwilling to take on paid employment. "Those who are so eager for the new inclosure," William Cobbett wrote,

"seem to argue as if the wasteland in its present state produced nothing at all. But is this the fact? Can anyone point out a single inch of it which does not produce something and the produce of which is made use of? It goes to the feeding of sheep, of cows of all descriptions . . . and it helps to rear, in health and vigour, numerous families of the children of the labourers, which children, were it not for these wastes, must be crammed into the stinking suburbs of towns?"63

While the dynamic identified by Lloyd clearly exists and may sometimes dominate, it represents just one factor of many in a social system founded on access to common property. Hardin's Tragedy bears very little relationship to the management of open fields, to the making of hay from the meadows, or to various other common rights such as gleaning, none of which are vulnerable to the dynamic of competitive overstocking. The only aspect of the entire common land system where the tragedy has any relevance at all is in the management of pasture and wasteland; and here it is acknowledged by almost all historians that commons managers were only too aware of the problem, and had plenty of mechanisms for dealing with it, even if they didn't always put them into force. The instances in which unstinted access to common pastures led to overstocking no doubt played a role in hastening eventual enclosure. But to attribute the disappearance of the English commons to the "remorseless workings" of a trite formula is a travesty of historical interpretation, carried out by a theorist with a pet idea, who knew little about the subject he was writing about.

PRIVATE INTEREST AND COMMON SENSE

Any well-structured economy will allocate resources communally or privately according to the different functions they perform. The main advantage of common ownership is equity, particularly in respect of activities where there are economies of scale; the main advantage of private ownership is freedom, since the use of goods can be more directly tailored to the needs of the individual.

The open field system of agriculture, which until recently was the dominant arable farming system throughout much of Europe, provided each family with its own plot of land, within a communally managed ecosystem. In villages where dairy was prominent, management could shift back and forth between individual and communal several times throughout the course of the day. The system described below was outlined by Daniel Defoe in his observations on the Somerset town of Cheddar 4, but elements of it can be found throughout Europe.

PRIVATE In such a system cows are owned and lodged by individual families, who milk them in the morning, and provide whatever medicinal care they see fit. There are no economies of scale to be derived from milking centrally, and the milk is accessible to consumers, fresh from the udder, providing a substantial economy of distribution. Each family also gets its share of the manure.
PUBLIC At an appointed time in the morning, a communally appointed cowherd passes through the village and the cows file out to make their way to the common pasture. There are clear economies of scale to be gained from grazing all the cows together.
PRIVATE In the evening the herd returns and cows peel off one by one to their individual sheds, where they are again milked. Their owners can calibrate the amount of extra feed cows are given to the amount of milk they require.
PUBLIC Milk surplus to domestic requirements is taken to the creamery and made into cheese, another process which benefits from economies of scale.
PRIVATE At Cheddar, families were paid with entire cheeses, weighing a hundredweight or more, which they could consume or market as they saw fit. Unfortunately Defoe does not tell us what happens to the whey from the creamery, which presumably was given to pigs.
This elegant system paid scant allegiance to ideology — it evolved from the dialogue between private interest and common sense.

OTMOOR FOREVER

Otmoor Common near Oxford, a wetland that some viewed as a "a dreary waste", was a "public common without stint . . . from remote antiquity" — in other words local people could put as many livestock as they wanted on it. Even so, summer grazing there for a cow was estimated to be worth 20 shillings; and a contemporary observer reported a cottager could sometimes clear £20 a year from running geese there — more than the seven shillings a week they might expect as a labourer. On the other hand, an advocate of enclosure, writing in the local paper, claimed of the commoners:

"In looking after a brood of goslings, a few rotten sheep, a skeleton of a cow or a mangy horse, they lost more than they might have gained by their day's work, and acquired habits of idleness and dissipation, and a dislike to honest labour, which has rendered them the riotous and lawless set of men that they have now shown themselves to be."

The "riotousness" is a reference to the resistance put up by the commoners to the theft of their land. The first proposal to drain and enclose the land in 1801, by the Spencer/Churchill family, was staved off by armed mobs who appeared everytime the authorities tried to pin up enclosure notices. A second attempt in 1814 was again met with "large mobs armed with every description of offensive weapon".

The enclosure and drainage was eventually forced through over the next few year, but it failed to result in any immediate agricultural benefit. A writer in another local paper judged: "instead of expected improvement in the quality of the soil, it had been rendered almost totaly worthless . . . few crops yielding any more than barely sufficient to pay for labour and seed."

In 1830, 22 farmers were acquitted of destroying embankments associated with the drainage works, and a few weeks later, heartened by this result, a mob gathered and perambulated the entire commons pulling down all the fences. Lord Churchill arrived with a troop of yeomen, arrested 44 of the rioters and took them off to Oxford gaol in a paddy wagon.

"Now it happened to be the day of St Giles' fair, and the street of St Giles along which the yeomanry brought their prisoners, was crowded. The men in the wagons raised the cry 'Otmoor forever', the crowd took it up, and attacked the yeomen with great violence, hurling brickbats, stones and sticks at them from every side . . . and all 44 prisoners escaped."

Two years later Lord Melbourne observed: "All the towns in the neighbourhood of Otmoor are more or less infected with the feelings of the most violent, and cannot at all be depended upon." And, tellingly, magistrates in Oxford who had requested troops to suppress the outrages warned: "Any force which the Government may send down should not remain for a length of time together, but that to avoid the possibilty of an undue connexion between the people and the Military, a succession of troops should be observed."

This article originally appeared as 'A Short History of Enclosure in Britain' in The Land Issue 7 Summer 2009 (Reprint)

References

1. Kevin Cahill, Who Owns Britain, Canongate, 2001.
2. E P Thompson, Customs in Common, Penguin, 1993, p114.
3. Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons", Science, 13 December, 1968, pp1243-1248.
4. Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through England and Wales, Everyman, Vol 1, pp 277-8.
5. William F Lloyd, Two Lectures in the Checks to Population, Oxford University Press, 1833.
6. Eg, E A Loayza, A Strategy for Fisheries Development, World Bank Discussion Paper 135, 1992.
7. E P Thompson, Customs in Common, Penguin, 1993, p107.
8. Arthur McEvoy, "Towards and Interactive Theory of Nature and Culture, Environmental Review, 11, 1987, p 299.
9. Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the 'Unmanaged' Commons", in R V Andelson, Commons Without Tragedy, Shepheard Walwyn, 1991.
10. The prospect of imminent enclosure provided wealthy commoners with a number of incentives for overstocking common pastures. See: JM Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820, Cambridge, 1993, p156; and W H R Curtier, The Enclosure and Redistribution of Our Land, Elibron 2005 (Oxford 1920), p242.
11. CS and C S Orwin's The Open Fields, Oxford, 1938 is perhaps the most useful study of this system, not least because the Orwin's were farmers as well as academics.. See also J V Beckett, A History of Laxton: England's Last Open Fioeld Village, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
12. Joan Thirsk, "The Common Fields", Past and Present, 29, 1964.
13 J-C Asselain, Histoire Economique de la France, du 18th Siècle à nos Jours. 1. De l"Ancien Régime à la Première Guerre Mondiale, Editions du Seuil. 1984
14. Paul Stirling, "The Domestic Cycle and the Distribution of Power in Turkish Villages" in Julian Pitt-Rivers (Ed.) Mediterranean Countrymen, The Hague, Mouton: 1963; Hans U. Spiess, Report on Draught Animals under Drought Fonditions in Central, Eastern and Southern zones of Region 1 (Tigray), United Nations Development ProgrammeEmergencies Unit for Ethiopia, 1994, http://www.africa.upenn.edu/eue_web/Oxen94.htm
15. In 1381, the St Albans contingent, led by William Grindcobbe accused the Abbot of St Albans of (among other abuses) enclosing common land. Jesse Collings, Land Reform,: Occupying Ownership, Peasant Proprietary and Rural Education, Longmans Green and Co, p 120; and on Cade p138.
16. W E Tate, The English Village Community and the Enclosure Movements, Gollancz,1967, pp122-125;W H R Curteis, op cit 10, p132.
17. Ibid.
18. Thomas More, Utopia, Everyman, 1994.
19. Tate, op cit 17, pp 124-127.
20. William Everard et al, The True Levellers' Standard Advanced, 1649.
21. Early hippie organizations in California and the UK called themselves the San Francisco Diggers, and the Hyde Park Diggers respectively.
22. Jerrard Winstanley, A Letter to The Lord Fairfax and his Council of War, Giles Calvert, 1649.The quotation about manuring wasteland is cited by Christopher Hill, Gerard Winstanley: 17th Century Communiat at Kingston, Kingston Umiversity lecture, 24 Jan 1966, available at http://www.diggers.org/free_city.htm
23. Holinshed's Chronicles, Vol 3, p220. Fabyan's Chronicle states of Cade "They faude him right discrete in his answerys". Cited in Jesse Collings, op cit 15, p 139.
24. David Boulton, Gerrard Winstanley and the Republic of Heaven, Dales Historical Monographs, 1999, chapter XIII.
25. Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror, Macmillan, 1978, pp375-6
26. E P Thompson, Whigs and Hunters, Allen Lane , 1985.
27. Guy Vassal, La Guerre des Demoiselles, Editions de Paris, 2009.
28. See the article in this magazine by Roland Girtler and Gerald Kohl.
29. All the information on the fens in this section is taken from Joan Thirsk, English Peasant Farming: The Agrarian History of Lincolnshire from Tudor to Recent Times, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957.
30. Anon, The Anti-Projector; or the History of the Fen Project, 1646?, cited in Joan Thirsk, ibid, p30.
31. John Prebble, The Highland Clearances, 1963, p79.
32. Alastair McIntosh, "Wild Scots and Buffoon History", The Land 1, 2006.
33. Quoted in James Hunter, Skye, the Island, Mainstream, Edinburgh, 1986, p118.
34. One of best short accounts is in pp1-52 of Neeson, op cit 9, though there is also useful material in Tate, op cit 17, pp63-90.
35 Curtier, op cit 10; Tate op cit 17. A pro-enclosure summary of the General Views can be found on pp224-252 of Lord Ernle, English Farming Past and Present, 1912.
36. Arthur Young, Autobiography, 1898, republished AM Kelley, 1967.
37. G Slater, "Historical Outline of Land Ownership in England", in The Land , The Report of the Land Enquiry Committee, Hodder and Stoughton, 1913.
38. J L and Barbara Hammond, The Village Labourer, Guild, 1948 (1911) p60.
39 Thompson mentions the "long historiographical reaction against those fine historians, Barbara and JL Hammomd." Thompson, op cit 2, p115.
40. Tate, op cit 17, p97.
41. Curteis, op cit 10, p241.
42. Brian Inglis, Poverty and the Industrial Revolution, 1971, pp89-90, and p385.
43.Ibid, p386.
44 Kevin Cahill, op cit 1, p30.
45. David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus, Cambridge, 1969. p452.
46. Thirsk, op cit 29, p311.
47. Letters from America, cited by KDM Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, Cambridge 1985.
48. Tate op cit 15, p138. These figures are challenged by Curtier, whose The Enclosure and Redistribution of Our Land, op cit 10, is an apology for the landowning class. Curtier, an advocate of smallholdings maintained that thanks to landowners' generosity "there were a considerable number of small holdings in existence" and that "the lamentation over the landlessness of the poorer classes has been overdone". Yet he admits that "the total number of those having allotments and smallholdings bears a very small proportion to the total of the poorer classes." Curtier has a useful account of the effects of the various smallholding and allotment acts (pp278-301).
49. Collings, op cit 15; and Slater, op cit 37.
50. S Fairlie, "Farm Squat", The Land 2, Summer 2006.
51. Tate, op cit 15, p136.
52. Lord Eversley, English Commons and Forests, 1894.
53. George Bourne, Change in the Village, Penguin 1984 (1912), pp 77-78.
54. G M Trevelyan, English Social History, Longmans, p379.
47. Lord Ernle, English Farming Past and Present, Longmans, 1912.
55. Humanby, see J A Yelling, Common Field and Enclosure in England 1450-1850, Macmillan, 1977; Barrowby, see Joan Thirsk, op cit 29. J V, Beckett, The Agricultural Revolution, Basil Blackwell, 1990 provides a summary of this change of approach.
56. J M Neeson, op cit 10 . Other key books covering this debate include E C K Gonner, Common Land and Enclosure, Macmillan, 1912; J D Mingay, The Agricultural Revolution 1750-1880, Batsford, 1970; J A Yelling, ibid.
57. Institut National D'Etudes Demographiques, Total Population (Urban and Rural) of metropolitan France and Population Density — censuses 1846 to 2004, INED website; UK figures: from Lawson 1967, cited at http://web.ukonline.co.uk/thursday.handleigh/demography/population-size/...
58. Doreen Warriner, Economics of Peasant Farming, Oxford, 1939, p3.
59.Gonner, op ci 56 p337 and p306; Neeson, op cit 10, pp86 and 156; Thirsk, op cit 29, pp38, 116 and 213.
60. Cited in Curtier, op cit 10.
61. Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef, Dutton, 1992,p60.
62. Neeson, op cit 28 pp 165, 311 and passim.
63. William Cobbett, Selections from the Political Register, 1813, Vol IV. 

A Working-Class Response to Trump's 2020 State of the Union Address

The wealthy have taken everything from us, and continue to find ways to take even more. It is never enough for them. And, year after year, their political puppets in both capitalist parties ensure that their rivers and avenues of unfathomable, flowing wealth never dry up or close down. When needed, they construct more. Always at our expense, and always through our collective (and manufactured) misery. The wealthy create or produce nothing of value, barely lift a finger in their daily routines, and get richer and richer directly through our labor, our exploitation, our indebtedness, and our mass dispossession of land and resources. 

Barack Obama was the empire fully clothed, hiding these horrors with impressive displays of eloquence and articulation. Donald Trump is the empire without clothes, naked and with all of its horror on full display. With or without clothes, the horrors exist. With or without clothes, these horrors have disastrous consequences for billions of people worldwide, which are viewed as nothing more than collateral damage sustained through coordinated resource extraction and [disaster] capitalism. For the majority, including most Americans, this reality has existed for centuries. 

This "response" was written an hour before last Tuesday's address because we knew that whatever words would come out of Trump’s mouth would be empty. They are inconsequential to us. They are nothing more than damage control, designed to instill false hopes through the vast wastelands of this country. Just as they were with Obama, both Bushs, Clinton, Reagan, and so on. No matter who stands and delivers this yearly address, the poor get poorer, the rich get richer, and the bombs never stop falling. The working-class struggle also never ends, and has only become more and more difficult. 

We have had enough. 

Capitalism's predatory onslaught has run its course. America's bourgeois democracy is no longer a suitable cover for a nation that has committed systemic crimes against the global majority, including its own working-class citizens, and especially its indigenous people, its women, its immigrants, and its people of color. From constant war and never-ending exploitation to forced indebtedness and smothering repression, the people no longer believe in this charade. We know that governments in capitalist society are but "committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class."

The future does not belong to Presidents, Senators, bankers, executives, hedge-fund manipulators, speculators, investors, financiers, shareholders, cops, landlords, bosses, owners, prison guards, ICE agents, and border patrol agents. It belongs to warehouse workers, carpenters, laborers, bus drivers, teachers, forklift operators, baristas, janitors, restaurant workers, nurses, social workers, firefighters, farmers, prisoners, the unemployed, the homeless, the disenfranchised, and all who have been forced into a hopeless existence only so a small percentage of the population can accumulate more wealth than they know what to do with. 

The empire has been exposed. The "state" and the "union" are myths constructed to hide the class and racial divides that are deeply rooted in the country’s foundation. The American "middle class" was an historical anomaly that will never return, and is only kept alive as a carrot for politicians to dangle in front of us every election season. Capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy are approaching their demise. The fascist tide that has reared its ugly head under late-stage capitalism is already being snuffed out in the streets by courageous, working-class warriors. 

The people are rising, like lions after slumber, in unvanquishable number. The future is ours. And your words, Mr. Trump, mean nothing to us.

All power to the people.

Against Akon's New Liberia: Class Remains The Key Link

By Christopher Winston

This was originally published at Hood Communist.

There has been much confusion regarding the character, purpose, and benefit of projects in Africa such as those launched by multimillionaire musical artist Akon in Senegal. This project is described by the New York Post as being “run entirely on renewable energy” and Akon himself is quoted as saying: “With the AKoin we are building cities, the first one being in Senegal…we’re securing the land and closing out all the legislation papers for the city. We want to make it a free zone and cryptocurrency-driven as a test market.” Essentially, this is a capitalist project. This is an old strategy, one of wealthy diasporic Africans (Akon himself is of Senegalese extraction) returning to the motherland, buying up property, and trying to construct little Wakandas. The recolonization movement in the early 1800s (backed by wealthy colonizers in the UK and US) led to the formation of two “independent states” on the West Coast of Africa, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. These countries were not independent, they can be seen as the first neocolonial test cases. In the case of Sierra Leone, initially populated by diasporic Africans who self-liberated from slavery during the American “Revolution”, it remained a colony of Britain until 1961. Both countries lacked native control over their natural resources. Liberian rubber was the property of Yankee corporations, diamonds from Sierra Leone remained in the grasping hands of the British. One of the main reasons that the Americans sought to destroy the movement led by Marcus Garvey was that it promoted, encouraged, and developed strategies for African economic self-determination in the US, in the Caribbean and Latin America, and in the Continent. The imperialists simply could not allow this, and it is to the eternal demerit of Communists that we failed to develop mass links and a United Front with this movement which captured the energy and support of tens of millions of Africans, instead of working for its destruction because we saw it as an ideological and political rival. 

Back to the Akon City project. Akon’s goals, I believe, are not willfully malicious. I begrudge no African that thinks they are genuinely helping their people. However, this project is a capitalist project and thus is doomed to either fail or set up a wealthy utopia for Europeans and Africans with the means to play around with cryptocurrency and such. In essence, Akon is hamstrung by his class position and class stand. Rich Africans returning to the Continent and seeking to set up what are essentially little Liberias and little Wakandas is a strategy that does not take into account the presence and insidious machinations of neocolonialism and bureaucratic capitalism (compradorism). Africa is poor not because the people there are bad capitalists. Africa is poor because of capitalism and imperialism and its lackeys on the Continent who are installed to ensure the flow of resources to the old colonial metropoles. Akon City is closed to the tens of thousands of Congolese youth who mine the coltan which will fuel Akon’s cryptocurrency. Akon City is closed to the hundreds of thousands in Dakar who live in shipping containers and do not have running water, or electricity. Akon City is as real to the majority of Africans as Wakanda is. For all Africans to enjoy a high standard of living it is essential to replace capitalist pipe dreams with Pan-African socialist reality. Africans, working-class and peasant Africans, must have control of our wealth and our Continent. Neocolonialism and imperialism must be buried with armed force. As long as colonizers continue to loot our continent we will see no peace, millions of us will continue to die no matter how many glass and concrete monstrosities Akon constructs. Look to Liberia and Sierra Leone as negative examples, and study the works of those such as Kwame Nkrumah, Malcolm X, and other Pan-African revolutionaries. Apply them to our day to day reality, analyze and criticize everything, and seize the time. Take class as the key link.

MLK and the Black Misleadership Class

By Glen Ford

Originally published at Black Agenda Report.

Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday is the greatest sheer spectacle of hypocrisy and historical duplicity of the year, as Black misleaders take center stage to claim his mandate and mission on behalf of a corporate party.

The birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is commemorated each year at thousands of events in literally every U.S. city, yet the martyred human rights leader’s political philosophy is totally absent from the agenda of today’s Black Misleadership Class, a grasping cabal of hustlers and opportunists that have grown fat and infinitely corrupt through their collaboration with “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.” Their “freedom train” was the Democratic Party, the half of the corporate electoral duopoly that allowed colored folks to ride as first class passengers – as long as they didn’t question the schedule or the destination. The budding Black misleaders hopped on board the Democratic Party express to the boardrooms of corporate power at about the same time that Dr. King was making his definitive break with the evil “triplets’” infernal machinery, including both corporate parties.  

In his April 4, 1967 “Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence” speech  at New York City’s Riverside Church, Dr. King burned his bridges with the nation’s top Democrat, despite President Lyndon Johnson’s indispensable role in pushing civil and voting rights and anti-poverty bills through Congress and championing an affirmative action rationale that -- as spelled out in his 1965 speech  at Howard University -- was a principled endorsement of reparations for crimes committed against Black people by the U.S. society and State. Johnson went farther than any previous U.S. president in acknowledging Black American citizenship rights and grievances, even as the Republican half of the electoral duopoly was preparing to assume the role of White Man’s Party through Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy.” Yet, Dr. King, a proponent of peace and democratic socialism, understood that the way to the “Promised Land” was not through Black collaboration with the evils inherent in capitalism and its ceaseless, predatory wars. “I have come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house,” King told his friend , Harry Belafonte. 

By 1967, the War in Vietnam was consuming the promises of Johnson’s Great Society. America was undeniably the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” King declared. The U.S. had already killed a million Vietnamese, “mostly children,” but it was also a war on America’s poor. “I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube,” King told the crowd at Riverside. “So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.” That meant breaking with the Democrats and their president. More importantly, in his Riverside speech Dr. King framed the Vietnamese as engaged in a righteous struggle to complete their long quest for sovereignty and independence. King broke with imperialism, the consummate expression of the all three “triple evils.” So they killed him, the next year.

The National Security State, the protector of the capitalist order, to which both parties are beholden, then proceeded to crush the Black movement to the left of Dr. King – most fiercely in the Gestapo-like assault on the self-determinationist and staunchly anti-imperialist Black Panther Party in the bloody year of 1969. 

By 1970, the Black Radical Tradition lay mostly in the graveyard, and the way was clear for the Black Misleadership Class to monopolize Black politics on behalf of their corporate overseers. The first act of the first big city Black mayor, Cleveland’s Carl Stokes, was to put the police under the command of a Black retired general, whose first act was to issue the cops flesh- and bone-destroying hollow point bullets. 

The rise of the almost entirely Democrat-allied Black Misleadership Class is perfectly coterminous with construction of the Black Mass Incarceration State. The “New Jim Crow” was a bipartisan project, initiated under Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which vastly increased the manpower and funding for local police departments, and was put on hyper-drive by Republican President Richard Nixon’s “War on Drugs” – a War on Blacks that never ended but was re-declared by Republican President Reagan and reinforced by Democrat President Bill Clinton. At the local level, the exponential growth of the Mass Black Incarceration regime was administered by increasingly Black city governments, which oversaw and processed the deportation of millions of Black men, women and children to the Prison Gulag. Virtually all of these Black operatives of race and class oppression are Democrats. And all of them are celebrating their own political ascension as the wondrous outcome of Dr. King’s “dream.”

By 2014, 80 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus was voting to continue the Pentagon 1033 program that funnels billions of dollars in military weapons and gear to local police departments. Four years later, 75 percent of the Black Caucus voted to make police a “protected class” and assault on cops a federal crime. (See BAR, “Black Caucus Sells Out Its Constituents Again – to the Cops.”)

Although the Black misleaders were quick to join the domestic war on the Black poor, African American public opinion remained war-averse, skeptical of U.S. motives on foreign shores. In 2003, only four Black members of Congress backed George Bush’s invasion of Iraq. But the advent of the Black Democratic President -- a misleader par excellence – gave much of the Black Caucus a free pass to play warmonger. Half of the Blacks in Congress voted to continue the bombing and regime change in Libya, an African nation, in the summer of 2011. None of the Caucus has raised serious objections to the U.S.-aided slaughter of more than six million Congolese under Presidents Clinton (Dem.), Bush (Rep.), Obama (Dem.), and Trump (Rep.). The American military occupation of much of the African continent through AFRICOM is a non-issue among the Black misleaders. 

RUSSIA!!! on the other hand, is an existential threat “to our democracy,” say the Black Democrats, who are eager to pledge their allegiance to the same CIA and National Security State that assassinated Patrice Lumumba, murdered Malcolm, King and scores of Black Panthers, and worked hand in glove with white-ruled South Africa to kill thousands of freedom fighters across the continent. Los Angeles Black Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who once (correctly) charged the CIA with flooding her city with crack cocaine, now struts around waving an American flag while denouncing “Russian” meddling in a U.S. election that was actually stolen by Republican suppression of Black votes, as usual – with no serious protest by Democrats, as usual. 

The Black misleaders are as silly as they are shameless, but they are not ineffectual. No white man could eviscerate Dr. King’s radical legacy, or make Malcolm X appear harmless to the imperial order – that’s a job for the Black Misleadershsip Class. While Dr. King rejected an alliance with the “triple evils,” Black Democratic misleaders describe their deal with the Devil as smart, “strategic” politics. They whip up war fever against small, non-white nations that seek only the right to govern themselves, behaving no differently on the world scene – and sometimes worse – than Donald Trump.

They shame and weaken Black America, and have joined the enemies of life on Earth. King would shake his head, mournfully. Malcolm would keep his tight smile, doggedly. Then both would organize to expose and depose the Black Misleadership Class. 

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

The Nakba Generation and the Makings of Palestinian Revolution

By Abdel Razzaq Takriti

The Palestinian revolution was created by the men and women who lived through the experience of the Nakba (the Catastrophe). These revolutionaries identified themselves as ‘The Nakba Generation’, and their world can be understood only in light of this foundational event. As with all collective tragedies the Nakba can be approached in a number of ways. Most commonly it is defined in terms of the number of people uprooted from their homes; the forcible expulsion and dispossession of 750,000-950,000 Palestinians; the violent expropriation of 78% of their native lands by recently arrived European Jewish settlers; the death of more than 12,000 Palestinians over 1947 and 1948 along with the injury of tens of thousands; the massacre of hundreds of villagers and townspeople in nearly three dozen localities.

Yet these numbers do not capture the meaning of the Nakba, which is better grasped through the now thousands of oral narratives and memoirs of the period that have been recorded, filmed, written down, and published. Each highlights the seminal nature of the event, and the Nakba’s overwhelming impact upon the lives of those who experienced it. Amongst these histories there is a specificity to revolutionary recollections. These do not only describe the moments of individual and collective destruction of home and society; they allow us to understand the centrality of the experience of dispossession to the formation of Palestinian revolutionary consciousness.

The first accounts here are by Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad) and George Habash (Al-Hakeem), two young men who went on to become leading revolutionaries. Their recollections give us a sense of their secondary socialisation prior to the Nakba. Both figures were involved in anti-colonial activities as school students in Jaffa and Lydd respectively, and their engagement took the shape of occasional mobilisations within resistance structures that had existed in Palestine during the late British Mandate period. In the case of Abu Iyad, this is seen in his participation in the Ashbāl (Lion Cubs) section of the al-Najjada organisation, a type of patriotic boy scouts’ activity. As for Habash it was reflected through his participation in school strikes and national demonstrations. More significantly, both accounts illustrate that a national tragedy, affecting an entire people, was witnessed and experienced at an extremely intimate level. Neither Khalaf nor Habash heard of these events through the radio, a newspaper, or even a parent, grandparent or other relative: they lived through the unfolding collective disaster themselves.

The factual record of the Nakba is growing rapidly, and researchers are unearthing atrocities whose memory had hitherto been overlooked. These moments of profound national loss altered the lives of a large number of future Palestinian leaders and cadres. One example is the Tantura massacre, during which dozens of inhabitants from the village were slaughtered. ʿAbd al-Razzaq al-Yahya, a young cadet from this village (and a future commander of the Palestine Liberation Army) gives his account here. His memories reflect the anguish and concern he experienced as he learnt of the massacre while receiving military training in Syria, and the profound marks it left on his family and himself.

One of those mentioned in this source is ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Husayni, who lost his life during the battle for Palestine. Such iconic figures were revered on both a national and a broader Arab scale, and had a stature that can be seen in any macro-historical account. However, the experience of the Nakba can also be approached most usefully micro-historically. At a grassroots level, memories of resistance were connected to local as well as national experiences. Most fighters (especially in rural districts) did not publish memoirs, but their accounts circulated orally, creatizing the foundation for a growing literature of local Palestinian histories. A typical example is the discussion of the village of Hamama in the ͑Asqalan district authored by a son of the village. Such sources provide a rich description of the lives of rural men and women that would otherwise be overlooked, recording the resistance of those that fought and lived, as well as the names of those that died.

A recurring theme in such accounts is the imagination and ingenuity of fighters in devising methods of resistance in the face of superior Zionist strength and inadequate Arab army support. One such description, of the defense of Salamah village, describes the benefits of shifting political organisation for the defense of a town from its notables to the youth, through elections. For many future revolutionaries growing up in the refugee camps of the 1950s, these stories of fighters from their own villages had a deep influence on their worldviews and future choices. Equally influential was a sense of the political and military helplessness that surrounded the experience of dispossession. Palestinians lacked adequate organisations, weapons, or training to confront the scale of the military assault waged against their them. This predicament created the impetus for more organised future revolutionary involvement, one that could provide a concrete means to reverse their dispossession from their homes.

The absence of powerful and effective organisations on the eve of the Nakba was due to a variety of factors. Most important was (and as noted by Abu Iyad), the wholesale destruction of organised political activity by the British colonial power during the 1936-39 Palestinian revolt, critically weakening Palestinian capacity for resistance in 1948. Yet there was widespread resistance: as the memoirs of Ahmad al-Yamani (Abu Mahir) show, huge effort was exerted on local levels to withstand the existential crisis then faced by Palestinians. Abu Mahir, for instance, drew on his experience as a trade union organiser and working class activist to establish local committees in the Galilee district surrounding his village Suhmata. This initiative eventually collapsed through an overpowering military conquest, and ultimately the inhabitants of the district were all forced out of Palestine. Before they were expelled, some were thrown into forced labour camps, as described here, or coerced into acting as servants for Zionist fighters.

The urban notable leadership did not possess either material or military backing to prevent this national destruction, nor did they have the political capacities to represent their people, or preserve their country intact. The most ambitious of their political initiatives, in the immediate aftermath of the Nakba, was the All-Palestine Government, whose founding declaration is presented here. The government was established on 22 September 1948, at a time when the Nakba was still unfolding. Although its official capital was Jerusalem, its actual headquarters were in Gaza before moving (under Egyptian pressure) to Cairo. Its President (Haj Amin al-Husayni), Prime Minister (Ahmad Hilmi ʿAbd al-Baqi Pasha), and the cabinet were made up of ministers all drawn from urban notable backgrounds.

In theory this institution (recognised by the Arab League states except Jordan) had a mandate that extended over the entirety of Palestine. However, by the end of the war the state of Israel had just been established over 78% of the British Mandate Palestine’s territory; the remaining 22% of the country was now referred to as “the West Bank and Gaza Strip”. Those Palestinians remaining in territories lost in 1948 were subjected to strict Israeli military rule and martial law, while the West Bank was annexed by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Only a very small corner of Palestine, the Gaza Strip, was theoretically under the domain of the All-Palestine Government. Even there however, political, military, and financial control was firmly held by the Egyptian administration. So, by the end of the 1948 war, Palestine was erased from the political map.

Under such extreme conditions of external colonial and regional domination, the All-Palestine government proved unable to advance their people’s cause. The core demand of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and lands was completely rejected by the new Israeli state. A tiny number of refugees smuggled themselves back into their country, including political figures affiliated with the Communist Party such as Emile Habibi and Emile Touma. They became prominent leaders within the ranks of Palestinians who remained within the boundaries of the newly established Israeli state.

The political and humanitarian outcomes of the 1948 War created major transformations in regional political thought, as Arab intellectuals began to grapple with the outcome of the war and its cataclysmic implications. Amongst the most significant texts to emerge was The Meaning of Disaster (Maʿana al-Nakba). This classic text, published in August 1948, was written by Constantine Zurayk, a Syrian professor at the American University of Beirut (AUB), and one of the foremost Arab intellectual figures of the mid 20th century. It was here that the word “Nakba” was first used as a description of the series of events of 1947 to 1948 in Palestine. These events were not only catastrophic for the Palestinians, wrote Zurayk, but for the Arabs as a whole. In his estimation, the catastrophe was caused by the absence of a modern political structure that could liberate the Arab world from foreign dominance and control. Therefore, reversing the Nakba required Arab political and territorial unity, as well as economic and social modernisation. This great transformation, in Zurayk’s conception, could only come about through a young revolutionary elite that possessed a modernising social and political outlook and impeccable moral credentials. From the perspective of Palestinian revolutionary history, perhaps the most important passages here pertain to the critical step this elite must undertake, which was to “organise and unify itself into well-knit parties and organisations.”

The theory of revolutionary transformation articulated by Zurayk belongs to the well established vanguardist tradition in modern political thought. What is most relevant to the generation of the Nakba is its immense impact on the Arab political scene. One of the book’s immediate and direct effects was the establishment of a group that eventually took the name the Movement of Arab Nationalists (MAN) in Beirut. The next reading is from the memoirs of one of its founders, Ahmad al-Khatib, who was a Kuwaiti medical student in 1948. Al-Khatib was part of a circle of students from various Arab countries, including George Habash, Wadiʿ Haddad, and Hani al-Hindi, all closely connected to Zurayk, and highly influenced by The Meaning of Disaster. Giving a sense of the intellectual development of this group, al-Khatib’s memoirs show how the aim of reversing the Nakba propelled him and his comrades to seek the transformation of the Arab political reality by creating a clandestine network operating across the region. Al-Khatib established the Kuwaiti branch of this network, which was soon to become the most important political movement in that country, and a firm base for pan-Arab popular action towards the liberation of Palestine.

Al-Khatib was part of a generation that understood the cause of Palestine as belonging to them as much as it belonged to the Palestinian people. However, his experience of the Nakba was more direct than most. His time as a medical volunteer in ʿAin al-Hilweh refugee camp for Palestinians in the south of Lebanon filled him with frustration with “the Zionists, the countries that supported them, and the Arab parties and countries that failed the Palestinians.” This frustration provided the impetus to chart a path influenced by the legacy of the previous generation of Palestinian revolutionaries. Along with George Habash and Wadiʿ Haddad, al-Khatib would regularly visit an injured old fighter, Ibrahim Abu Dayya. Abu Dayya taught them patriotic songs and shared his vast experience of armed struggle in great detail. He had participated in the 1936 revolt, but had really gained fame and distinction during the 1948 war, when he was a leading military commander with a famous victory at the battle of Surif. Severely wounded after being hit with seven bullets during a successful attack on Ramat Rahil, he eventually ended up in the AUB hospital in Beirut. On the news of his death in March 1952, he was eulogised in the recently established newspaper al-Thaʾar, the earliest publication of the Movement of Arab Nationalists. Here, the young generation of revolutionaries vowed, in his memory, to revive the struggle, drawing on his rich historical legacy.

While prominent fighters like Abu Dayya were remembered by name, ordinary people involved in the struggle for Palestine lived on in collective forms such as literature. Their experiences were reconstructed in the works of revolutionary authors such as Samira Azzam, who experienced the Nakba as a 20-year-old young woman and became active in the Palestine Liberation Front-Path of Return group in the 1960s. Her short story Bread of Sacrifice (1960) approaches the Nakba from the standpoint of Palestinian urban resistance. Set on the eve of the fall of Haifa, April 22 1948, the story is underscored by romantic motifs, and culminates in a tragic ending. Yet tragedy here signals an on-going grievance that is a source of renewed mobilisation. Significantly, this mobilisation draws upon the contributions of women as well as men. As Azzam’s heroine Suʿad makes clear, confronting the Nakba was a natural and essential human need experienced regardless of gender, and challenging patriarchal authority was the first step towards women’s participation in the revolutionary struggle to return home.

Beyond its defining impact on Palestinian and Arab grassroots political movements, the Nakba also shaped the experience of a generation of Arab leaders who assumed power through revolutionary action in the 1950s. Many had participated in the Palestine War, fighting in their countries’ armies following the Arab declaration of war in May 1948. The most prominent of these was Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose time in Palestine influenced the future course of the Palestinian revolution; his approach to the cause, his understanding of it, and his sympathy with it cannot be viewed in isolation from his experience of the Nakba, as seen in his memoirs. For members of his generation, this event was a defining moment that had altered the fate of the region for decades to come.

Republished from The Palestinian Revolution, a bilingual Arabic/English online learning resource that explores Palestinian revolutionary practice and thought from the Nakba of 1948, to the siege of Beirut in 1982

Sources

1. Iyad, Abu (Salah Khalaf). My Home, My Land: A Narrative of the Palestinian Struggle, New York: Times Books, 1981 (pp. 3-12).

2. Habash, George. al-Thawriyun La Yamutun Abadan. Beirut: Dar Al-Saqi, 2009 (pp.27-30).

3. Al-Yahya, ʿAbd al-Razzaq. Bayn al-ʿAskariya wa-l-Siyasiya. Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2006 (pp. 39-44).

4. Abu ʿAwda, Ali. Qariyat Hammama: Tarikh wa Turath wa Ansab. Gaza: Samir Mansour Library, 2015 (pp. 582-599).

5. al-Yamani, Ahmad Husayn Tajrubati Maʿa al-Ayyam. Damascus: Dar Canaan, 2004. (pp. 153-174 & 193-205).

6. Declarations of the All-Palestine Government, September – October 1948 in Documents on Palestine Volume II: 1948-1973, Jerusalem: The Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, 2007.

7. Zurayk, Constantine, The Meaning of the Disaster. Beirut: Khayat's College Book Cooperative, 1956 (pp. 2-3, 34-37 & 42-45).

8. al-Khatib, Ahmad. Kuwait: Min Al-Imara Ila al-Dawla, Dhakariyat al-ʿAmal al-Watani wa-l-Qawmi. Beirut: The Arab Cultural Center, 2007 (pp. 72-83).

9. “Ibrahim Abu Dayya” [Obituary]. Al-Tha’r (Beirut), Thursday 20 November 1953 (p. 8).

10. ʿAzzām, Samīra. Khobz Al-Fida’i. Beirut: Dar al-Awda, 1956.

11. League of Arab States. Arab League Declaration of War. Damascus, 15 May 1948.

12. Abdel Nasser, Gamal. “Memoirs of the First Palestine War, Part I”. Akher Sa’a (Cairo), April 1955.

13. Photographs of Lydda and Jaffa before 1948. Library of Congress.

Sorry to Bother You with Twelve Theses on Boots Riley's "Sorry to Bother You": Lessons for the Left

By Bryant William Sculos

Originally published in 2019 in Class, Race and Corporate Power.

1.   Films thus far have merely interpreted the world; the point however is to change it….

This would be more appropriate as thesis eleven, but it is a crucial starting point for what follows. No matter how radical, no matter how popular, a critical film is, a film by itself, not even one as prescient and valuable as Sorry to Bother You is, is enough to change the world. Not that anyone would suggest that it could be, but radical films can serve important purposes in the struggle against capitalism and various forms of oppression. A good radical film can inspire and even simply entertain those engaged in struggle—or those thinking about becoming more active. Sorry to Bother You will not change the world, but it can be an important basis for motivation, critical conversation, and necessary enjoyment for those in struggling to do just that.

2.   Tactics should always be informed by an organized strategy.

Sorry to Bother You highlights the difference between pure subversive tactics and an organized strategy for resistance. In the film there is a group of anarchist-types, of what size or of what degree of organization the audience never sees, whose primary role in the film is to highlight the impotence of pure tactics (in this film, this amounts to clever vandalism) disconnected from a coherent strategy for organized opposition. Juxtaposed to these tactics we see the hard work of organizing a workplace and an eventual strike. While the strike may not have heralded the end of capitalism, the audience bears witness to the clear difference in results (including both the response of the capitalist class and their police force as well as the ability of the strike to bring new layers of people into struggle).

3.   As important as the superiority of tactics informed by an organized strategy is, it is perhaps as important how those on the left address their internal disagreements about strategies and tactics.

There is a subtle scene between Squeeze (the labor activist attempting to organize the workers at the telemarketing firm, played by Steven Yeun) and Detroit (perhaps the best radical feminist of color ever seen in a popular US film, played superbly by Tessa Thompson). Squeeze becomes aware that Detroit is part of the anarchist group doing the anticapitalist vandalism and instead of criticizing Detroit’s tactics, Squeeze takes the opportunity to appreciate that they are both on the same side of the struggle. This solidaristic interaction serves as the basis to build deeper, more active solidarity in the future (some of which we see later in the film). It is often difficult for those on the left to ignore or at least put aside disagreements over tactics and strategy, and sometimes it is important that the Left not leave disagreements unaddressed, but Sorry to Bother You provides some insight into how the Left can deal with internal, and interpersonal, disagreements in ways that do not further alienate us from one another. After all, the Left needs all the comrades it can get. What makes someone a comrade is a contentious issue to be sure, but it is an important one that the Left should continue to reflect on.

4.   Solidarity across identities is crucial.

Perhaps one of the most obvious—though no less important—lessons from Sorry to Bother You, with its awesome diverse cast and characters, is that class has colors and genders and a variety of other identities that come with their own unique oppressions that condition the experience of class in diverse ways. Not only does the film illuminate the intersections of racism and capitalism (the “white voices” are the stuff of film legend here), but we also see cross-racial, cross-gender, and even cross- (fictional) species solidarity. If Sorry to Bother You does one thing well (and it does way more than just one thing well), it is expressing the importance of building this kind of intersectional solidarity, as well as how the variable experiences of class can be navigated without chauvinism or exclusion. While the treatment of non-fictional racial and gender solidarity is powerful in its own right, Boots Riley’s use of the (for now…) fictional equisapiens drives the point home. Ending the exploitation of some group at the expense of others can never be an acceptable Left position.

5.   Art can be radical, but not all subversive art is radical, at least not on its own.

Detroit, in addition to her day job as a sign twirler and then as a telemarketer, is an artist. Beyond the politics of Sorry to Bother You, the film also delves into the difficulty of being a subversive artist within the confines of capitalism, which demands that all art be commodifiable in order to be of any value. Despite Detroit’s best efforts to resist this pressure, we see her engage in a powerful and uncomfortable piece of performance art where her audience is asked to throw things at her, including broken electronics and blood-filled balloons. The scene is a bit of a parody of ostensibly “radical” art that is consumed by a primarily bourgeois audience. Subversive art that challenges the commodity-form can itself become commodified, but it can still be useful as a foundation to challenge artistic norms and social conventions, break down the barrier between performer and audience. However, even at its best there is no guarantee that anything will fundamentally change because of these dissensual elements. Sorry to Bother You is a better example of what radical, subversive art can be than the artistic performances it portrays—though neither one is the basis for revolutionary activity. While the critical theorists and postmodernists of the late twentieth century are right to emphasize the importance of aesthetics in radical politics and resist the temptation, embodied most noticeably in socialist realism, to use art strictly instrumentally, art disconnected from organized struggle is bound to be as ineffective as any tactic disconnected from organized struggle. Sorry to Bother You does not provide a clear alternative, but it does provide a powerful basis to think through the question of how art can relate to radical politics, and radical politics to art, effectively.

6.   Material conditions are shaped by ideological conditions, which in turn affect our psychologies.

As the protagonist Cassius “Cash” Green (portrayed by Lakeith Stanfield with incredible complexity and skill to make the audience cringe in every instance they are supposed to) moves up the ladder at the telemarketing company, after living in poverty for years, his perspective on poverty and the plight of workers shifts in perverse but predictable directions. Consciousness is never one-to-one with class position, something that is perhaps still too obvious for the Left to effectively grapple with, but the radical beauty of Sorry to Bother You is how well Boots Riley is able to show how consciousness changes as wealth (though not always identical to class position) increases. Capitalism as a whole dehumanizes even those who benefit from it, though workers and the poor and oppressed should have little patience or sympathy for those who benefit unequally from the exploitation they reproduce. As difficult as it is, it is important to remember this, that even as capitalists and the defenders of capitalism come to personify the evils of capitalism, they too are driven by the heinous psycho-social incentives of the system. While this is, in itself, important to be cognizant of, it is more important to be aware of the process through which this happens to middle class people, and even workers fortunate enough to escape the dregs of poverty wages.

7.   Contacting your elected officials is not nearly enough and can actually be demoralizing and demobilizing.

One of the best scenes in the film, enhanced by the speed with which is begins and ends, is when Cash decides to make public the genetic alteration plans of Steve Lift (CEO of the Amazon-like WorryFree, played by Armie Hammer). Cash goes on an absurd reality TV show and various news programs to tell the world about the equisapien experiments and implores people to contact their elected officials. The montage ends with WorryFree’s stock rising and the general public excited about the new technological developments. Nothing changes. The lesson here is that Cash was relying on the representatives of the system that encourages the kinds of perversity that Steve Lift represents to solve the problem. Cash encouraged people to place their hope in decrepit politicians. The audience experiences the results too quickly. The montage is powerful as it stands, but it is worth questioning whether the full range of critical points here might be lost on even a well-focused self-reflective audience (though I noticed so perhaps I’m the one being too cynical). Cash placed his hope in the automatic negative reactions of people—people who have been conditioned by capitalism to view all technological developments as progressive and liberating—to resist those changes. Back in the real world, while there are some instances where outrage may seem (or even actually be) more or less automatic, there is often unseen or unacknowledged organizing and propagandistic work being done to produce an effective public reaction. The best recent example of this is from the 2017 airport protests/occupations in reaction to President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban. While some of the people showed up at the airports spontaneously, there were also a number of left-wing groups, of diverse politics, working to make these actions effective. It is likely we would not have witnessed the positive results we saw from these actions had it not been for the quick, organized work of activists on the ground. And yet, it all appeared rather spontaneous.

8.  The truth is not enough, and it will not set us free. Truth is not irrelevant, but it is not enough for the Left simply to be “right.”

Related to thesis 7, Cash relies on his exposing the truth to the world to be the catalyst for widespread resistance to the practices of WorryFree. Mind you, this is all taking place in a world where all of the other dehumanizing practices of WorryFree, such as: lifetime contracts for workers, with all room and board provided but without pay, are deemed acceptable. Why would artificially producing human-horse hybrid workers be any different? While there is a vital educational role for the Left to play in providing the factual basis for the need for organized resistance and building an alternative to racist, patriarchal, imperialist capitalism, these facts are not enough. Facts can be interpreted in various ways and perverted by the mouthpieces of capitalism, often most egregiously by the ostensibly liberal vanguard of “progressive” capitalism. The Left needs to not only be “right” but it also needs to provide deeper context and present viable options to pursue. Put differently, in addition to having the truth on its side, the Left needs to be persuasive.

9.   Automation is complicated and likely will not take the forms or have the effects the public are often led to believe it will have.

The world has been browbeaten into thinking that the worst consequences of increased automation in the twenty-first century will be mass unemployment. Sorry to Bother You, believe it or not, provides a glimpse at one more realistic alternative—as well as a basis for a more honest look at the effects of automation. First, as we have seen throughout the history of capitalism, workers themselves, both physically and psychologically, are made into automatons. Second, the worst consequences of automation is not joblessness but deskilling. Part of the automation of human beings is the decreased cognitive and creative labor that more and more jobs will require or allow. Companies, whether it is WorryFree or Amazon, would much prefer the less expensive route of encouraging society, primarily through culture and schooling, to produce less thoughtful, more compliant workers, rather than spend huge sums of money on automation technologies that could become obsolete within a few years. Automation technology under capitalism is expensive. On the flipside, people under capitalism have been made to be quite inexpensive. Maybe we all will not be turned into human-horse hybrids, but given the trajectory of undemocratic automatic in the early years of the twenty-first century, we will not likely be looking at a Jetsons-esque lifestyle for everyone. People will likely continue to be subjected to intense pressures to physically, psychologically, and chemically alter themselves in order to acquire even slightly higher wages.

10.  People, especially workers within capitalism, are willing to accept very little money or benefits in exchange for their labor and even their lives.

Capitalist exploitation and oppressions degrade people. Capitalist ideology convinces people that they are merely worth whatever some boss is willing to pay them—and they are fortunate to have what little they have. After all, there are plenty of people with less. This reality puts impoverished workers in a terrible situation when bosses try to buy them off to undermine labor organizing or threaten a worker with firing for talking about politics at work. This reality is also part of the root cause of conservative labor union practices, which often sacrifice anything beyond moderate gains in wages and benefits for worker compliance. The promise of a more lavish lifestyle, new clothes and a new car (or really just a car that is reliable) is what motivates Cash to sell-out. Scabs may indeed be the scum of the Earth from a labor organizing perspective (and there’s no reason to think otherwise), but they are motivated by the very same things that motivate workers to sell their labor for a wage in the first place. So really, besides the immediacy of the betrayal, what is the difference between a scab and worker who refuses to join their union or a worker who does not vote to support a strike? The results and the motivations are fundamentally identical. This is not a defense of scabbing (as if such a defense were actually possible), but it is a lesson that needs to be learned. Capitalist ideology is extremely powerful, and it compels us all in various ways to become subjects of our exploitation and the exploitation of others. Scabs and other types of non-class-conscious workers are as much a product of capitalism as the credit card is.

11.  Sorry to bother—and even betray—you, but apologies and forgiveness matter.

Even after Cash betrays his fellow-workers and friends by crossing their picket lines multiple times, once he realizes his grave error and is determined to join them in struggle, his friends forgive him. They accept his apology. The apology does not change what Cash did, but it reflects his commitment to doing the right things moving forward. This might be one of the hardest lessons for the Left to learn from this movie. How does one forgive someone who has betrayed them, especially when it was not just a friendship that was betrayed but an entire movement? However, put differently, how can the Left ever be successful moving forward without the capacity to forgive and work alongside those who have actively worked against the Left in their past? Where is the place for former liberals (or even former conservatives or reactionaries)? Where is the place for former scabs? Sorry to Bother You argues that despite the awfulness of one’s past positions and actions, the answer to these two preceding questions is: among the Left. Very few people are born into radical politics, and almost no one holds the right views from the start, and so people need time to learn and grow. Sometimes it is a very longtime filled with egregious beliefs and behaviors—but if the Left is to ever be effective, it will be populated mainly by these kinds of people.[1]

12.  The first win (or loss) is only a beginning…

Sorry to Bother You ends with a victory of sorts. A small one. Without spoiling too much, the lesson here is that strikes, whether successful or not, can only ever be the start of a revolutionary movement. Same for protests. Protests in and of themselves are not going to bring down a government or a political-economic system. Strikes will not either. There is plenty of debate on the Left about whether a mass general strike could do that, but even with something as powerful as a general strike (which is really only practically imaginable with preliminary strikes and protests preceding it) it would be unlikely on its own to replace capitalism with socialism (or whatever your preferred label for a democratic, egalitarian form of postcapitalism is). Revolutionary transformation is not something that can be won or lost overnight, with one victory—nor can it be lost with one loss, by one strike that fails or never happens, by one protest that has low turnout or fails to motivate further actions. Hope is crucial, but it must be tempered by a realistic pessimism regarding the struggle ahead. There will be many loses and hopefully many more wins—but the struggle continues. Even if capitalism were successfully dismantled, what replaces it will also be an object of struggle, one that will require that we learn as much as we can from all the struggles that precedes it.

Bryant William Sculos, Ph.D. is Visiting Assistant Professor of global politics and theory at Worcester State University. He was formerly a Mellon-Sawyer postdoctoral fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and 2019 Summer Fellow at the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry at the New School for Social Research. Bryant is the Politics of Culture section editor for the open-access journal Class, Race and Corporate Power and contributing editor for the Hampton Institute. Beyond his work for the aforementioned outlets, his work has also appeared in New Politics, Dissident Voice, Truthout, Constellations, Capitalism, Communication, & Critique (tripleC), New Political Science, and Public Seminar. He is also the co-editor (with Prof. Mary Caputi) of Teaching Marx & Critical Theory in the 21st Century (Brill, 2019; paperback forthcoming July 2020 with Haymarket Books).

Notes

[1] Although she was writing about how socialists should deal with liberals at Women’s Marches, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s writings served as crucial inspiration for this point. See: “Don’t Shame the First Steps of a Resistance” in Socialist Worker, Jan. 24, 2017. Available online at: https://socialistworker.org/2017/01/24/dont-shame-the-first-steps-of-a-resistance.

Never Forget the Real MLK

As our state-sponsored celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. commences, let’s not forget some important facts about this great man:

1. He was against the Vietnam War during a time when many Americans were not. Decades later, this view against the war has developed into a mainstream narrative, but in the 1960s, those who spoke out and marched against it (students, Civil Rights leaders) and refused to serve (Muhammad Ali) were beaten, hosed down, killed, and jailed. He would undoubtedly be railing against the US imperialist state and its perpetual war machine today

2. He condemned issues like poverty, inequality, and racism as systemic ills, not merely individual shortcomings. To this day, such broad analyses (those touching on capitalism and white supremacy) are rejected and disregarded by most as “fringe” or “too radical.” In this way, Dr. King would still be viewed as “too radical” by the current mainstream media (the same folks who whitewash and co-opt his legacy, and then celebrate this watered-down version of the man).

3. He was hated and despised by a majority of white America. In 1966, he had a 63 percent negative poll rating. He had rocks thrown at his head and was routinely spat on during marches. This hatred still exists today. Simply turn on TV stations or radio shows or peruse social media comments to see how black liberation movements are ridiculed, loathed, and detested by the thousands. Nazis and white supremacists are marching in US streets and congregating on social media. There is no doubt that Dr. King would be on the front lines of current movements; and, therefore, would still take the brunt of this hatred, ignorance, and disrespect - even today.

4. He was considered to be “an enemy of the state” by various government agencies. The FBI tapped his phone calls, blacklisted him as a “suspected Communist,” and sent anonymous letters demeaning him and encouraging him to commit suicide. Various levels of the government, from the FBI to the Memphis Police Dept, have been found to have some involvement in his death.

5. He initiated the “Poor People’s Campaign” and put forth an economic and social bill of rights that espoused “a national responsibility to provide work for all.” Dr. King advocated for a jobs guarantee and would end unemployment by requiring the government to provide jobs to anyone who could not find one. The bill of rights also included “the right of every citizen to a minimum income," regardless of whether they are employed. Today, these proposals would be laughed at by media pundits, and he would be written off as "crazy" by many of the same folks who pretend to celebrate him.

6. He supported the Planned Parenthood Federation and believed that things like “family planning and contraception” should be fully funded by the government – ideas that are despised by modern conservatives who have no shame in calling on their whitewashed version of Dr. King’s legacy to use for their own agendas.

Celebrating Dr. King’s life and role in the struggle is important, but learning and considering the real man and his real ideas is even more crucial in a time that still needs them.

Let’s celebrate Dr. King for who he really was: a radical people’s champion who confronted the power structure, faced down the defenders of this structure, challenged capitalism, challenged poverty, challenged white supremacy, challenged militarism and war, and challenged the status quo that engulfs all of these elements – a status quo that still exists. A status quo that now shamelessly co-opts his legacy for its own use.

Never Forget.

Lessons of Rojava and Histories of Abolition

By Brendan McQuade

Originally published at Marxist sociology blog.

The Rojava Revolution is one of the most important revolutionary struggle of recent years. In the context of civil war and great power intrigue, the Kurdish movement evolved into a multi-ethnic and non-sectarian autonomous administration that governs approximately two million people in Northeastern Syria. These liberated areas have produced important experiments in direct democracy, cooperative and ecological development, and community self-defense and conflict resolution.

The Revolution is also the liberatory counterpoint to the Islamic State. In 2014 and 2015, Rojava’s militias received international attention for breaking the Islamic State’s siege of the city of Kobani and creating an evacuation corridor for some 50,000 Yazidis who were fleeing the Islamic State. Given the Syrian Civil War is also a climate conflict, the great political question of the 21st century may well be the socialism of Rojava or the barbarism of the Islamic State.

It’s no surprise the Rojava Revolution has been a point of inspiration for radicals across the world and, particularly, abolitionists and others on the libertarian-left. In their manifesto, Burn Down the American Plantation, the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement, an anarchist organization with chapters in Philadelphia, New York Chicago, New Haven, and California’s Inland Empire, considers Rojava to be a blueprint for organization elsewhere: “The Rojava Revolution, the anti-state revolution in northern Syria, provides us with a successful example of the strategies of organization and resistance we need to apply in the US today.”

It’s also no surprise that the Rojava Revolution may soon be over. The revolution developed in a power vacuum created when Assad government unilaterally withdrew from the Kurdish regions in Northeast Syria to focus on the developing civil war in Western Syria. The United States made a pragmatic alliance with Rojava during the campaign against the Islamic State but what that support meant going forward was never clear. Turkey, Syria’s neighbor to the north, is keen to both see Assad out and the Kurdish movement crushed. Between Turkey and the Trump administration, it was only a matter of time before the precarious balance of political forces shifted against Rojava. In October 2019, the US withdrew troops from Syria, clearing the way for Turkish invasion. This threat, in turn, forced Rojava to reconcile with Damascus for short term survival. What this means for the future of the Revolution is far from clear but it’s hard to feel encouraged.

What does this tragedy mean for our understanding of political struggle today? Does the seeming twilight of the Rojava Revolution mean that it is just another failed one? The Rojava Revolution could not defend itself against the state. It’s unclear how similar strategies could prevail in the United States, where the openings for the type of democratic autonomy seen Rojava are much smaller (or perhaps fundamentally different).

These questions, I contend, can only be answered if we confront them on the level of political strategy and opportunity, rather than political philosophy and identity. Abolitionists and anti-authoritarians are right to be inspired by example of Rojava but translating the lessons of the Revolution to a wildly different political context like the United States is no simple task. To better understand the Rojava Revolution, I return to the fundamentals of historical materialism. My recent article published Social Justice, “Histories of Abolition, Critiques of Security,” considers Rojava in relation to the debates abolition in the nascent US left: the rejection of abolition as fanciful and its defense as an area of non-reformist reformism in the struggle for 21st century socialism and strategy of insurrection. The impasse between a rejection of abolition and the tired revolution/reform binary can be resolved by returning to fundamentals of historical materialism, and particularly, W.E.B. Du Bois’ analysis of “abolition democracy” in his seminal work, Black Reconstruction.

Histories of Abolition

Abolition democracy refers to the social forces that led the “Reconstruction of Democracy” after the Civil War. It was revolutionary experiment made possible, first, by the direct action of black workers, a General Strike, and, later, advanced through continual mobilization (including armed self-defense) and the non-reformist reforms of Radical Reconstruction. While the antislavery struggle provided the political content of abolition democracy, this revolutionary project existed in precarious conditions, the temporary alignment of black workers, middle class abolitionists represented in Congress by the Radical Republicans, and, eventually, northern industrialists and poor southern whites. It was a revolutionary moment that was never fully consolidated and, as result, its gains were rolled back.

Despite this seeming failure, the moment held a deeper significance that middle class Abolitionists (and many subsequent scholars) largely missed. Abolition democracy challenged the fundamental class relations upon which historical capitalism stood: a racially stratified global division of labor, which, starting the in the sixteenth century, tied Europe, West Africa, and the Americas together in a capitalist world-economy. Black workers were the most devalued and exploited laborers, what Du Bois called “the foundation stone not only of Southern social structure but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-scale.”

By striking at the root of global capitalism, the American Civil War that produced the cataclysm and change that created the possibility for radical change. This possibility was lost because the Abolitionists never confronted capital and the labor movement never embraced abolition. When politics shifted, the temporary class alliances that enabled radical reconstruction gave way to what Du Bois called a “counter-revolution” or “dictatorship of property.”

On a more general level, Du Bois establishes the need to understand abolition in relation to the (1) social relations and (2) historical processes that define a particular historical moment, while also considering (3) social movement clusters that were contesting these relations of forces. In Black Reconstruction, then, Du Bois analyzes the abolition democracy in relation (1) the class composition of the antebellum United States, (2) the consolidation of an industrial economy, and (3) the interaction of the budding labor movement with the anti-slavery actions of black workers and Abolitionists.

In this way, Black Reconstruction offers a different understanding of abolition, beyond the tired revolution-reform binary. As an analytic and organizing concept, abolition democracy becomes the liberatory politics embedded within struggles of historically-specific mobilizations of popular forces. It is the struggle for freedom from violent regulation and subjectification. Du Bois shows that it is organically tied up with the related fights to secure conditions for social reproduction, distribute the social product, shape shared institutions, and set collective priorities. In other words, abolition—or socialism, for that matter—is not a political program we can define in the abstract and implement. It is a process of liberation tied to broader clusters of emancipatory movements as they emerge and exist within specific historical moments. The question, then, is not revolution or reform but who is fighting for abolition—or socialism—what does that even mean in the contemporary United States and what will it take to win.

Du Bois provides a historical materialist understanding of abolition as interplay of disruptive direct action and incremental change within a historically informed understanding of a particular social struggle. This holistic approach highlights the specific social relations that constitute the exploitative and oppressive social formations in which we live. In this way, Du Bois can provide the necessary perspective to ask what kind of interventions could be “non-reformist,” while also creating space to understand direct action and insurrection in terms of political strategy, rather than philosophy.

Abolition, Socialism and Political Strategy

This approach undermines some of the common slogans made about nature of structural violence today. Mass incarceration is not the New Jim Crow nor is it a direct a simple outgrowth of slavery. What Angela Davis terms “the prison of slavery and the slavery of prison” are different arrangements. Slavery, convict leasing, and Jim Crow were systems to marshal and mobilize labor. Mass incarceration is a system to warehouse surplus populations. These differences, moreover, speak to tremendous structural transformations in the world-economy and the American state. If we want to be politically effective, we, unlike abolitionists of the 1860s, must appreciate the specificities of our moment.

This means acknowledging that, as Julia Sudbury does, “the slavery-prison analogy tends to erase the presence of non-black prisoners.” It means recognizing that an exclusive focus on anti-black racism threatens to dismiss the experiences of Latinx and indigenous people with imprisonment, policing, and state violence. It means admitting that the incarceration rate for white people in the United States, while much lower than that of historically marginalized groups, is still grotesque in comparison with the rest of the world. In the words of Angela Davis, it means understanding that the prison “has become a receptacle for all those human beings who bear the inheritance of the failure to create abolition democracy in the aftermath of slavery,” while also recognizing that “this inheritance is not only born by black prisoners, but by poor Latino, Native American, Asian and white prisoners.” It means it thinking about revolutionary strategy in way that appreciates the historical forces that create our moment, without being unthinkingly tied to anachronistic ideas and strategies that today may be ineffective.

Most importantly, this perspective allows us to situate powerful moments of revolutionary breakthrough in their historical context and derive the appropriate conclusions from them. In this regard, we should not dismiss the way Burn Down the American Plantation highlights the experience of Rojava Revolution. Rather, we should understand the social processes and social relations that surround this important event, namely the collapse of the state during Syria Civil War and the trajectory of the Kurdish Movement.

Contextualizing the Rojava Revolution in this manner is not the same as dismissing its relevance. Instead, it allows us to usefully interpret its lessons from the vantage point of particular time and place. Recognizing that the Rojava Revolution took place amidst civil war and state collapse raises doubts about the applicability of the model in areas where the state is strong. Burn Down the American Plantation advocates “placing self-defense at the center of our revolutionary movement” and calls on existing anti-fascist groups and cop watches to model themselves on the self-defense forces of Rojava Revolution. Specifically, the manifesto calls on these organizations to “Develop…the capacity to begin launching offensive actions against fascists and the regime.” This advocacy for armed insurrection is misguided. It fails to appreciate the conditions that made Rojava possible, while also neglecting to mention the awesome coercive powers of the American state and the weakness of the nascent American left.

Moreover, contextualizing Rojava gives us the possibility of translating the lessons of the Revolution into our context. The continually high numbers of “police involved shootings” in the United States, the breakthrough of white supremacist movements, the escalating confrontations at protests, and mounting incidents of political violence all underscore the urgent need to community self-defense in this political moment. This is need is structural as evinced by the recent emergence of armed left formations in the United States like the Socialist Relief Association and the Red Guards of the Party for Socialism and Liberation that joined older groups like Red Neck Revolt.

More generally, there is a budding muncipalist movement in the United States that, in part, draws on some of the same intellectual currents that also inform Rojava. In this United States, this movement is best exemplified by Jackson-Kush Plan associated with Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and Cooperation Jackson. The plan has three pillars building cooperative economy, creating participatory structures at the city level, networking progressive political leaders. Moreover, this electoral road to libertarian socialism at the city level has already delivered some concrete results. In 2013, Jackson, Mississippi elected Mayor Chokwe Lumumba, who campaigned on the promises of to implement the Jackson Plan. Although Lumumba died less than year into office, his son, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, successfully won the mayoral race in June 2017. Already, the new administration pursuing an economic development strategy based around promoting cooperative businesses and putting in place a participatory process, empowering popular assemblies organized by to develop a budget proposal/

Notably, however, Chokwe Antar Lumumba’s young administration has been remarkably conventional when it comes to criminal justice. While the Mayor Lumumba has repeatedly drawn the link between crime and poverty, he’s also pledged to be “tough on crime.” Moreover, the new administration has maintained conventional police force and made no moves toward instituting community control of the police. Here, in a city where political power is held by radical administration, the self-defense experiments of the Rojava Revolution may make an instructive example, albeit not a simple blueprint. If grassroots alternatives to police existed in Jackson, could it pressure Lumumba to adopt more radical positions like community control of police or—better—disband the police department and replace it with community controlled self-defense forces and restorative justice bodies? The point here is not outline a political platform or provide a detailed analysis of contemporary attempts to create municipal socialism in Jackson but rather to demonstrate the way the holistic and historical conception of abolition advanced by Du Bois expands our expands our political parameters, allowing us to both make sense our current conditions and relate them to other powerful instances of abolitionist organizing.

Taken together, this approach to abolition allows us to both learn for the past and appreciate how previous struggles shaped the specificities of the present moment. If abolition can be usefully described as the liberatory politics immanent within the historically specific social struggles, one should be able to find abolitionist tendencies, abolitionist demands, abolitionist practices, and abolitionist institutions in most emancipatory movements. This approach can allow us to consider these moments relationally and learn the historical lessons of other moments of “abolition democracy.” This is how we learn what it takes to get free.

Brendan McQuade is an assistant professor at University of Southern Maine and author of Pacifying the Homeland. This commentary is adapted from a longer article published in Social Justice.

A Modest Proposal for Socialist Revolution

By Chris Wright

At this point in history, two things are clear. First, Marx was right that capitalism is torn by too many “contradictions” to be sustainable indefinitely as a global economic system. In its terminal period, which we’re entering now (and which we can predict will last generations, because a global economic order doesn’t vanish in a decade or two), it will be afflicted by so many popular uprisings—on the left and the right—so many economic, political, and ecological crises causing so much turmoil and dislocation, that only a permanent and worldwide fascism would be able to save it. But fascism, by its murderous and ultra-nationalistic nature, can be neither permanent nor continuously enforced worldwide. Even just in the United States, the governmental structure is too vast and federated, there are too many thousands of relatively independent political jurisdictions, for a truly fascist regime to be consolidated nationwide, in every nook and cranny of the country. Fascism, or neo-fascism, is only a temporary and partial solution for the ruling class.

Second, the original Marxist predictions of how a transition to a new society would play out are wrong and outdated. Some Marxists still continue to think in terms of the old formulations, but they’re a hundred years behind the times. It is no longer helpful (it never was, really) to proclaim that a “dictatorship of the proletariat” will “smash the state” and reconstruct society through initiatives that magically transform an authoritarian, bureaucratic, exploitative economy into an emancipatory, democratic one of dispersed power. The conceptual and empirical problems with this orthodox view are overwhelming, as I’ve explained in this book (chapters 4 and 6). As if the leaders of a popular movement that, miraculously, managed to overcome the monopoly over military force of a ruling class in an advanced capitalist country and took over the government (whether electorally or through an insurrection) would, by means of conscious aforethought, be able to transcend the “dialectical contradictions” and massive complexity of society to straightforwardly rebuild the economy from the ground up, all while successfully fending off the attacks and sabotage of the capitalist class! The story is so idealistic it’s incredible any Marxists can believe it (or some variant of it).

Some leftist writers have argued, rightly, against an insurrectionary approach to revolution in a core capitalist nation, using the words of Kautsky and other old Marxists to make their point. But it isn’t necessary to follow this general practice of endlessly poring over the works of Kautsky, Bernstein, Luxemburg, Lenin, and others who wrote in a dramatically different political economy than the present. It can be useful to familiarize oneself with hundred-year-old debates, but ultimately the real desideratum is just some critical common sense. We don’t need pretentious academic exercises that conclude in some such statement of truisms as the following (from an article by Stephen Maher and Rafael Khachaturian):

“What is certain is that waging a struggle within and against the state demands that we build new forms of democratic participation and working class organization with the goal of breaking definitively with capitalist production relations and forms of political authority. This process will occur in fits and starts… Navigating between a reflexive anti-statism and the fallacy of attempting to “occupy” state institutions without transforming them is undoubtedly challenging. But only in this way can we advance beyond the past shortcomings of both dual power and social democratic approaches to the capitalist state.”

Pure truism, which it wasn’t necessary to write a long essay to support. So let’s shun elitist jargon and academic insularity, instead using the democratic capacity of reason that’s available to everyone.

The social democratic (or “democratic socialist”) approach to revolution is favored by the Jacobin school of thought: elect socialists to office and build a social democratic state such as envisioned by Bernie Sanders—but don’t rest content with such a state. Keep agitating for more radical reforms—don’t let the capitalist class erode popular gains, but instead keep building on them—until at last genuine socialism is realized.

I’ve criticized the Jacobin vision elsewhere. It’s a lovely dream, but it’s over-optimistic. The social democratic stage of history, premised on industrial unionism and limited capital mobility, is over. It’s a key lesson of Marxism itself that we can’t return to the past, to conditions that no longer exist; we can’t resurrect previous social formations after they have succumbed to the ruthless, globalizing, atomizing logic of capital.

Suppose Bernie Sanders is elected this year (which itself would be remarkable, given the hostility of the entire ruling class). Will he be able to enact Medicare for All, free higher education, a Green New Deal, safe and secure housing for all, “workplace democracy,” or any other of his most ambitious goals? It’s highly unlikely. He’ll have to deal with a Congress full of Republicans and conservative Democrats, a conservative judiciary, a passionately obstructionist capitalist class, hostile state governments, a white supremacist electoral insurgency, etc. Only after purging Congress of the large majority of its centrists and conservatives would Sanders’ social democratic dreams be achievable—and such a purge is well-nigh unimaginable in the next ten or twenty years. Conservatives’ long march to their current ascendancy took fifty years, and they had enormous resources and existed in a sympathetic political economy. It’s hard to imagine that socialists will have much better luck.

Meanwhile, civilization will be succumbing to the catastrophic effects of climate change and ecological destruction. It is unlikely that an expansive social democracy on an international scale will be forthcoming in these conditions.

So, if both insurrection and social democracy are apparently hopeless, what is left? Realistically, only the path I lay out in my above-linked book.[1] Marx was right that a new society can be erected only on the basis of new production relations. Democratic, cooperative, egalitarian relations of production cannot be implanted by fiat from the commanding heights of national governments. They have to emerge over time, over decades and generations, as the old society declines and collapses. The analogy with the transition from feudalism to capitalism is far from perfect (not least given the incredible length of time that earlier transition took), but it’s at least more suggestive than metaphorical, utopian slogans about “smashing the state” are. Through democratic initiative, allied with gradual changes in state policy as leftists are elected to office and the state is threatened by social disruption, new modes of production and distribution will emerge locally, interstitially, and eventually in the mainstream.

The historical logic of this long process, including why the state and ruling class will be forced to tolerate and aid the gradual growth of a “solidarity economy” (as a necessary concession to the masses), is discussed in the book. The left will grow in strength as repeated economic crises thin the ranks of the hyper-elite and destroy large amounts of wealth; the emerging “cooperative” and socialized institutions of economic and social life will, as they spread, contribute further to the resources and the victories of popular movements. Incrementally, as society is consumed by ecological crisis and neo-fascism proves unable to suppress social movements everywhere in the world, one can expect that the left will take over national states and remake social relations in alliance with these democratic movements.

Such predictions assume, of course, that civilization will not utterly collapse and descend into a post-apocalyptic nightmare. This is a possibility. But the only realistic alternative is the one I’m sketching.

Ironically, this “gradualist” model of revolution (which, incidentally, has little in common with Eduard Bernstein’s gradualism) is more consistent with the premises of historical materialism than are idealistic notions of socialists sweepingly taking over the state whether through elections or armed uprisings. At the end of the long process of transformation, socialists will indeed have taken complete control of national governments; and from this perch they’ll be able to carry the social revolution to its fruition, finalizing and politically consolidating all the changes that have taken place. But this end-goal is probably a hundred or more years in the future, because worldwide transitions between modes of production don’t happen quickly.

Again, one might recall the European transition from feudalism to capitalism: in country after country, the bourgeoisie couldn’t assume full control of the state until the liberal capitalist economy had already made significant inroads against feudalism and absolutism. Something similar will surely apply to a transition out of capitalism. It is a very Marxist point (however rarely it’s been made) to argue that the final conquest of political power must be grounded in the prior semi-conquest of economic power. You need colossal material resources to overthrow, even if “gradually,” an old ruling class.

What are the implications for activism of these ideas? In brief, activists must take the long view and not be cast into despair by, for instance, the inevitable failures of a potential Sanders presidency. There’s a role for every variety of activism, from electoral to union-building; and we shouldn’t have disdain for the activism that seeks to construct new institutions like public banks, municipal enterprises, cooperatives (worker, consumer, housing, financial, etc.), and other non-capitalist institutions we can hardly foresee at the moment. It’s all part of creating a “counter-hegemony” to erode the legitimacy of capitalism, present viable alternatives to it, and hasten its demise.

Meanwhile, the activism that seeks whatever limited “social democratic” gains are possible will remain essential, to improve the lives of people in the present. While full-fledged social democracy in a capitalist context is no longer in the cards, legislation to protect and expand limited social rights is.

Anyway, in the twenty-first century, it’s time Marxists stopped living in the shadow of the Russian Revolution. Let’s think creatively and without illusions about how to build post-capitalist institutions, never forgetting that the ultimate goal, as ever, is to take over the state.

Notes

[1] Being an outgrowth of my Master’s thesis, the book over-emphasizes worker cooperatives. It does, however, answer the usual Marxist objections to cooperatives as a component of social revolution.

Ending the Epoch of Exploitation: Pantherism and Dialectical Materialism in the 21st Century

By Chairman Shaka Zulu

Lots of people aren’t familiar with the term “bourgeoisie” or for that matter with thinking in terms of the different classes—even though we live in a class-based society. Moreover, we live in an epoch of history that is based upon class exploitation and class dictatorship. In this “Epoch of Exploitation,” there have been different ages each with their own distinctive class structures based upon the relationship each class had to the mode and means of production.

These can basically be defined as: Slavery, Feudalism, and Capitalism. In each of these periods, there was an exploiting ruling class, an exploited laboring class, and a middle class. Under slavery, there were Freemen as well as Slaves and Slave Owners. These might even be slave traders or hired men of the slave owners.

Under Feudalism, the lower class were the Serfs or poor peasants, and the ruling class were the landed nobility, the Lords, and Ladies. The middle class were the Burgers or Bourgeoisie, who lived in independent towns or burgs, which were centers of trade and manufacturing. These “freemen,” who governed their towns more or less democratically, waged a struggle with the Lords to maintain their independence and this culminated in a wave of Liberal Bourgeois Democratic Revolutions that overthrew Feudalism and replaced kingdoms with republics.

The bourgeoisie became the new ruling class and the petty bourgeoisie (little capitalists) became the new middle class, and a new class--the Proletariat—the urban wage workers and the poor peasants were the lower class. As the Industrial Revolution took off, the bourgeoisie got richer and the petty bourgeoisie more numerous, while the proletariat were formed into industrial armies to serve in the struggle with Nature to extract raw materials like coal and iron ore and transform them into steel and goods of all type.

In this Bourgeois Era, the bourgeoisie reconstructed society in their own image and interest. Under this Bourgeois Class Dictatorship, the state exists to maintain the inequality of the class relations and protect the property and interests of the ownership classes. Bourgeois Democracy is basically a charade to mask over the reality of class dictatorship. The masses may get to vote, but the ruling class calls the tune. Money talks and the government obeys.

The charade is for the benefit of the Petty Bourgeoisie who are the voters and hopers that the government can be made to serve their class interests. The dream that they will one day climb into the upper class and share in the privilege and opulence motivates them to subordinate their own class interests to those of the bourgeoisie. A greater challenge to the bourgeois class dictatorship is getting the working class to adopt its world view and politics that clearly do not serve their interests.

This is where the middle class are of use, and where some proletarians find their niche and a point of entry into the petty bourgeoisie as promoters of bourgeois ideology and politics. I’m talking about all manner of jobs and positions from union boss to preacher and news commentator to teacher. These hacks and hucksters sell us the illusion that this is the best of all possible systems and all is right with the world so long as we do as we are told.

They serve the ruling class by playing the game of “divide and rule” and throwing water on any sparks of resistance. They feed the masses disinformation and “fake news” and feed people’s idealism and false hopes to prevent them from identifying and thinking about their true class interests.

The job of our Party is to help the masses cut through this BS and to arm the people with an understanding of revolutionary science on which our political-ideological line is based. We call this Pantherism, and it is based on application of revolutionary science—dialectical materialism—to the concrete conditions we face in the 21st Century.

We make no bones about it, we are revolutionary socialists determined to bring the Epoch of Exploitation to and end and empower the common people. In other words to advance the evolution of human society to Communism.

DARE TO STRUGGLE DARE TO WIN… ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

Shaka Zulu is chairman of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party's prison chapter.